View Single Post
  #19  
Old Posted May 14, 2019, 10:36 PM
SignalHillHiker's Avatar
SignalHillHiker SignalHillHiker is offline
I ♣ Baby Seals
 
Join Date: Jul 2012
Location: Sin Jaaawnz, Newf'nland
Posts: 34,658
The latest from here...

It's not your imagination. N.L.'s weather is getting weirder

Quote:
...

"It's not something in Bangaladesh or Botswana, it's in Bonavista and Buchans ... nobody can escape it."

A few decades ago, Phillips says, the climate across North America "was probably one of the more stable and static periods of climate in the world," he said, noting temperatures in Atlantic Canada were actually dropping during the baby boomer era.

But in the lifetimes of today's Generation Z, the vast majority of years have been hotter than average. Where "you could depend on the climate and the weather ... now it just seems like wild cards," he said.

"It's almost like weather whiplash."



...

"If I was defining climate it would be the statistics of weather: every day you've got storms, temperature, winds, humidity," Phillips explained.

"If you average all that together it gives you the climate of the area."

And as the climate changes, he said, "the weather will be affected. It will be stormier storms, it could be heavier rainfalls. It could be shorter winters, longer summers, more beer-drinking weather."

All that means that a century ago, Newfoundland and Labrador could rely on fairly predictable seasonal patterns.

Now, it could be the hottest season on record one year, and frigid the next.

This year, spring, in particular, hasn't yet appeared. The bad news is, it probably won't at all, Phillips said.

Northeasterly winds are carrying in cold air off the North Atlantic, he explained, and we haven't been in the path of any warm fronts from the southern United States.

"We're going to have to be more patient. My sense is that spring is going to last days, not months," he said.

But when summer does hit, Phillips said models are showing it'll be hotter than usual across the province from mid-June through August.

"There is some light at the end of the tunnel," he chuckled. "Don't think summer is cancelled."

...

"What we need to do is to build our cities or neighbourhoods to withstand the kind of extremes of weather that we're going to see in the future," Phillips said, like preparing for floods or increases in pests from warmer winters.

"It's not as if what we're going to see here in Newfoundland are sandstorms or typhoons ... It's just the same old climate, but it's going to have different frequency statistics, more extremes. Things that would be something you'd expect once in a lifetime, it might happen every two or three years."
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/newfo...g-nl-1.5128073
__________________
Note to self: "The plural of anecdote is not evidence."
Reply With Quote