Why so snowy?The area around Boston, Massachusetts has been…kinda snowy lately. The city reportedly
Why so snowy?The area around Boston, Massachusetts has been…kinda snowy lately. The city reportedly received 71.8 (1.8 meters) inches of snow over the last 30 days, breaking the record for the snowiest month in the city’s recorded history by more than 10 inches (0.25 m). The snow depth to start this week was 37 inches (~0.94 meters), the largest depth recorded in city history, with more snow due this week. It’s so deep that they’re taking snow to a series of gigantic “snow farms” in open spaces and melting it in warmed trucks since they’ve run out of places to put it. Every weather system that hits an area has multiple causes, so what I’m about to show isn’t the only reason why Boston has been so snowy, but this is a remarkable graph showing one thing that is clearly impacting Boston’s snowpack this year.This plot shows sea surface temperatures off the coast of North America compared to the yearly average. Even during winter, abnormally warm water leads to more evaporation and can feed more precipitation on the continent. Much of the east coast is bordered by waters more than 5°C above average, and see that green patch? There are waters off the coast of New England that currently are more than 10°C above the normal average for early February.The snowfall has been very inconsistent – cities just west of Boston have received less than 10% the amount Boston has, the kind of pattern that could be fed by localized areas of extremely warm water off the shoreline.Again, this isn’t the only cause – warm waters won’t produce snow unless the right weather systems arrive, but it’s not a coincidence that it’s extremely snowy in Boston at the same time the waters off New England are so warm that NOAA needed to add a color past red to represent how warm they are.-JBBImage credit: http://1.usa.gov/17cUEK8Read more:http://usat.ly/1AadXyNhttp://bit.ly/1IPk3Kv (with snow farm images!)http://bit.ly/197r4pR -- source link
#winter#boston#weather#storm#science#atlantic#climate#climate change#global warming#new england