When the National Weather Service made its long-range forecast for the winter last fall, it was a good news/bad news scenario. They were predicting warmer-than-normal temperatures for our region, which was the good news (after all, who likes cold weather), but the bad news meant that this was further evidence of climate change and global warming. The past two winters in Eastern Mass. had been the warmest on record and that trend seemed poised to continue.
However, Ol’ Man Winter has had other ideas. Instead of spinning his polar vortex in a nice tight loop around the North Pole (which keeps the cold air tightly-wound around the pole), he’s been doing a sort of yo-yo effect with the vortex, allowing it to dip south and bring that frigid air to us.
The chronic instability of the polar vortex has been a relatively recent phenomenon. Climatologists tell us that the colder air that we experience when the vortex dips south ironically is a sign of overall global warming. The Arctic region has been among the fastest-warming places on the planet (four times faster than the rest of the world, which is why the polar bears don’t have enough sea ice for hunting seals in the summer months) — and that warming trend is upsetting the delicate balance of the vortex. According to some scientists, the warming Arctic is causing a weakening of the jet stream and ultimately sending cold air further south than usual.
So for us, what this has meant is that instead of having a warmer winter, we’ve had an unrelenting pattern of cold, dry, and windy days. This weekend’s light snowfall notwithstanding, almost every day from the end of December through January has been pretty much the same — temperatures in the 20s, brisk winds, and no precipitation.
It’s as if we’re living a real-life version of the movie Groundhog Day. The only saving grace is that we’ve had lots of sunshine.
For those of us who have oil heat, prices thankfully are the lowest they’ve been in a few years, although natural gas prices are higher than in the recent past.
So yes, it would be nice if this winter were warmer — but let’s face it, as cold as the weather has been, it could be a lot worse (and yes, we’re thinking of the Snowmageddon we experienced 10 years ago!).