TheClimateChanger

You know what they say, there are lies, there are damn lies, and then there are statistics. Here's how to manufacture a massive cooling trend from a trendless data. Move the station further and further away from the lake and present with no adjustment or even proper context. In fact, falsely claim the cooling should be even more pronounced if not for the ever-growing UHI effect. Chicago "thread" [Mean winter temps from 1926-27 to 1993-94] University of Chicago [Mean winter temps from 1926-27 to 1993-94] We can see using a fixed site (in this case, the University of Chicago), the 1960s and 1970s were somewhat colder than the preceding decades, but not to the extent shown on the threaded record. By the 1980s and early 1990s, temperatures had recovered and were already exceeding many of the past decades. Overall, a flat trend over that interval with a cyclical cooling and warming superimposed on the trend. Much more in line with the NOAA values for Cook County.

I was updating the post from last week.

I will acknowledge you can see that 2015 anomaly on this graphic as well that @Typhoon Tip mentioned. Not really sure what was going on there. It was like mother nature was trying to fight back or something but failed.

And anyone saying I'm being alarmist, look at the data yourself. For the first 30 years of this dataset, there is only one zone 7 year (1964), with a few others right at 0 [cusp of 6/7]. 6 of the last nine years have been zone 7, with one of those being zone 8 conditions. What used to be exceptionally rare, is now the norm and characteristic of the climate of Cleveland. All I'm doing is extrapolating the trend, which I find to also be consistent with my understanding of prior similar climate regimes.

This has always been my premise. When you look at similar ancient climate regimes with large inland bodies of water, you always find very warm subtropical flora and fauna well up into the mid and high latitudes. If you look at Cleveland, you can see traditionally it was zone 5 to cold zone 6, but now is firmly zone 7. 2023 was the first year [since 1960] with Zone 8 conditions. I don't put a whole lot of stock in the pre-1960 numbers due to a variety of reasons. Moving forward with these trends, it's reasonable to expect Zone 8 conditions to fully envelope this region by the latter half of this century. If warming continues, zones 9 to 10 look likely for next century. I've never seen a valid rebuttal to this. Only, oh shut up, Cleveland won't look like Miami. You are trolling.

Departure down to -0.6F as of yesterday. With a high temperature of 58F earlier, today should push it into the positive range for the first time this month.

Surprised there was less talk of this. CLE picked up 3.8" yesterday, which appears to be the third snowiest calendar day dating back to February 13, 2022 - a period of about 2 years and 10 months.

Interesting. Just checked and it's showing 7-8 inches for the city. I haven't seen anything that would lead me to believe that's a likely outcome.

I think the biggest question on everyone’s mind is whether PIT may see its first below normal month since August 2023. Through the first ten days of the month, December is sitting at -1.2F. My inclination, however, is no. The month will probably finish above normal. We shall see.

Would be a fitting end to what should go down in the record books as the warmest year on record just about everywhere.

It's little wonder they caught him at McDonald's.

The real crime is a man named Luigi winding up in a town where this medigan crap is called pizza.

Which one of you was it?

I mean such a sprawling area of a foot in a west to east area, not along a north to south band. There are no instances of any storm since 1974 that produced a foot of snow in Pittsburgh and Detroit, and pretty much everywhere in between. Since 1974, there have only been six unique [eliminating duplicated days from the same storm] storms that produced 12"+ at Detroit and at Pittsburgh, none of them were from the same storm. Both cities had storms of more than a foot in January 1978, but they were different events.