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Tuesday, January 3, 2012

This is What I've Been Waiting For (Part 1)

Disappointing December Weather

December was one of the most miserable winter weather months I can remember. In Minneapolis the average temperature for December is 19 Fahrenheit.  According to http://www.climatestations.com Minneapolis only had 4 below average days and anyone living here knows that it was miserably above average.  We regularly suffered through temperatures in the high 30’s and I recall several 40+ degree days.  In the Updraft blog MPR meteorologist Paul Huttner provides some perspective on what a normal December should be like. http://minnesota.publicradio.org/collections/special/columns/updraft/
Our early winter heat wave resulted in little to no snow.  Cross country skiers had to dust off their running shoes and rollerskiis.  Snow based industries like resorts and snowmobileries lost vacation bookings and sales.  And I can only imagine the angst that many snowplow operators must have felt as a brown Christmas came and went and their incomes continued to shrink.
What little snow we had in December was quickly consumed by the ravenous heat of warm fronts and the radiation absorbing albedoless brown grass landscape.  (Well brown grass doesn’t really have an albedo of 0. That distinction is reserved for a theoretical perfect blackbody that absorbs every bit of energy that hits it. However a dark and dormant grassy landscape does absorb more radiation than a fair snow covered landscape resulting in higher surface temperatures. Freshly fallen snow on the other hand is very reflective and therefore has a very high albedo and keeps temperatures low).
There are some who would welcome a mild winter but for those of us who relish the days between the auburn autumn and the sloppy spring the December heat wave was a climatologically positive feedback loop with negative implications.

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