Why did not winter come in December, but not end in March?
"Where is spring?" “March like February”. "This weekend, frost and snow again!" Guess which countries the news with such headlines is from? From Russia, of course, who would have doubted! Congratulations, you guessed it. But not exactly - the same is now the news about the weather in the US and in the UK. The cold, you know, is not only not an aunt, but also not politics - it is the same for everyone. And spring this year is in no hurry to go to Moscow, London, and Washington.
MARTOVSKIE FROST - FROM MOSCOW TO THE OUTSIDE
And here are just a few facts confirming this, on the example of the past weekend.
In the Moscow region, on the night of March 18, it froze to -27.3 degrees, the nights on Friday and Saturday were cold. This only happens once every 50-60 years - so that in mid-March the air cools down below -20 degrees for several nights in a row, they make a helpless gesture at the Moscow meteorological office. The average daily temperature at the weekend was 10 degrees below the climatic norm - like in mid-January! The snowdrifts in the capital are half a meter high.
In the neighboring regions, it will not work to get warm: in Vladimir on Monday night the frost reached -24 degrees, in Cherepovets it was almost -28, and these are the strongest colds for March 19 in the entire history of meteorological observations. In the Ryazan region -25, in the Samara region -27, in the Penza and Ulyanovsk regions as much as -30.
In several northern Russian cities - Vorkuta, Salekhard, Pevek - temperature records have recently been broken. A 40-degree cold is bursting there, which is abnormal even for these places, which are generally not affectionate.
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In the UK, Germany and France, March is also not warm. Last weekend England and Scotland were covered with snow. At London's Heathrow airport, 150 flights were canceled due to bad weather, and on Monday, classes were canceled in many schools in England - too cold (down to -10) and too much snow, no walk or drive. Foggy Albion has become frosty, according to the Phobos center.
A stadium worker in Manchester clears snow from the lawn before the start of the next England Championship match.
And even in Spain there is still no snow deficit. At the southernmost ski resort in Europe, in the Sierra Nevada, they have already decided to extend the skiing until May 6 - so this strange spring has its advantages.
On the other side of the ocean, the same picture. In Washington, the weather has been colder than climatic norms for two weeks in a row. On Tuesday and Wednesday, the American capital and most of the US east coast may be hit by a "winter storm," as weather forecasters call it - with sleet or freezing rain, that's how lucky. And it will become the fourth since the beginning of spring.
THE SEASONS HAVE MOVED A MONTH
Now let's remember: December 2017 in Moscow was 6 degrees warmer than the climatic norm, January 2018 - by 5 degrees. December was remembered for showers and thaws up to +8 degrees. There was no snow in Moscow until January 5! But February was already 1.5 degrees colder than it should be. And it began with the strongest snowfall in the history of meteorological observations. This is in Moscow. In February, Europe was covered with Siberian frosts - they were dubbed “The Beast from the East” (in English it sounds in rhyme: Beast from the East). Then snow fell asleep in Rome, the Cote d'Azur and Spanish beaches.
In general, the winter really turned out to be Russian - I harnessed it for a long time, then it was so accelerated that it could not stop at the end of March. As a result, we got as much frost and snowfall as in “normal” years. Just on a different schedule: winter has moved exactly one month.
Not a spring run in one of London's parks.
WHAT'S HAPPENING?
Yes, each specific cold snap and snowfall is easy to explain. Cyclones-anticyclones-atmospheric fronts. In our country, for example, the so-called Arctic, or ultrapolar invasion is to blame for the March frosts: after the cold atmospheric front, icy air from the Arctic “fell” into the middle zone. And in the United States, meteorologists are nodding toward the “nor'easter,” a giant cyclonic system over the North Atlantic.
But still - why did the seasons take and shift by a month? Will it always be this way now? Maybe it’s enough to complain about the December showers and March frosts - to take and rename the months in the calendar, so that everything would fall into place?
The head of Roshydromet Maksim Yakovenko either in one piece, or seriously advises to remember about … the old calendar. According to him, now is not the second half of March, but the very first days of spring! It seems to be no longer so offensive to see the "minus" on the thermometer in the morning.
- Spring is in spring, but in Moscow in March and -32 degrees can be, - Maxim Yakovenko does not add optimism.
Indeed, not a single temperature record has yet been broken in the capital in March 2018. The beginning of spring was even more severe. But for a long time! Almost all records for the current numbers have been held for a century and a half since 1915, since 1886 … Then no one had heard of global warming. And now it seems not logical to freeze!
THE ARCTIC IS WARM, WE ARE COLD
But it is global warming that does not allow spring to enter the entire Northern Hemisphere! More precisely, warming in a single region - in the Arctic. This is evidenced by a new study by climatologists at the Atmospheric and Environmental Research Center (USA) and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. They analyzed data on temperature at polar latitudes since the 1950s. And compared with what the winters were in the United States - for this, scientists have such a thing as the "index of the severity of winter." Both frosts and snowfalls are taken into account there. And it turned out that the warmer in the Arctic, the colder the winters.
- We saw a very clear connection: if in the polar latitudes winter is abnormally warm, in more southern latitudes it is very severe. Global warming is tricky. Yes, the average temperature on Earth is rising, but this can lead to such paradoxical consequences, - admits the author of the study, a specialist in long-term forecasts, Judah Cohen.
What is happening now in the Arctic? There, warming is proceeding by leaps and bounds: the average temperature on Earth is growing at a rate of 0.17 degrees in 10 years, while in the Arctic over the same 10 years it rises by 0.8 degrees. More than four times faster!
The past winter beyond the Arctic Circle turned out to be the “hottest” in the history of meteorological observations, temperatures often exceeded climatic norms by as much as 20 degrees. In Moscow the frost is harder than on Novaya Zemlya, in London it is colder than in Greenland … It sounds like a dystopia - but in the winter of 2017-18 such days did happen. And the ice in the Arctic Ocean is now less than it ever was in March.
- But winter tan lasts longer! Photo: EVGENIYA GUSEVA / kp.ru
FEVER OVER THE POLE
“Warm Arctic - cold continents” - this hypothesis has more and more supporters among climatologists, although the mechanism of work of communicating weather vessels is not yet fully understood.
It is possible that abnormally warm temperatures interfere with the so-called polar vortex - this is a huge atmospheric funnel constantly “hanging” over both poles of the planet. The polar vortex affects winter weather in the Northern Hemisphere - a fact that climatologists have known for a long time. The eddy is most active in winter, when the temperature contrast between the Arctic and temperate latitudes is maximum. The warmer the Arctic, the less contrast, and the polar vortex begins to behave strangely. The currents in it weaken, and it begins to "slide" from the Pole to the south, and carries with it the Arctic cold.
At the beginning of March 2018, the polar vortex split into two parts altogether! Added to global warming is its namesake - a climatic phenomenon called "sudden stratospheric warming." It's like a flu fever: at an altitude of 10 to 50 kilometers in the middle of winter, the temperature suddenly jumps upwards, sometimes even 50 degrees! The fever subsides in a day, two, sometimes ten. Sudden stratospheric warming is associated with the polar vortex (it weakens or completely collapses - and so it happened now), and with the weather in temperate latitudes and even the tropics, and with blocking anticyclones - when abnormal cold weather persists for a long time in vast territories.
What will happen next? Researchers believe that winters (and springs) like this one will become more frequent. “The faster the Arctic warms, the more unpredictable weather we will have with you,” says climatologist Robert Rohde of the Berkeley Earth Research Center. In general, prepare the sleigh in the summer, and the fur coat for global warming.
YULIA SMIRNOVA