Kennedy predicts hot and dry conditions from the west will shift eastward later this week, allowing for a noticeable warm-up and shift towards spring-like conditions.
In late January, Toronto was hit with what many experts said was the heaviest single day of snowfall in the city's history. In some spots, nearly 23in fell, driven in part by a collision of weather systems. The city had already removed 264,000 tonnes of snow from 1,100 km (680 miles) of roads, sidewalks and bike lanes by mid-February.
He had flown in from Mar-a-Lago and, he told me, was there to observe. The next day, he watched as Åsa Rennermalm, a Rutgers University professor who studies polar regions, sat onstage with European foreign ministers and spoke out against cuts to U.S. science funding. "A leading US Arctic scientist is on stage absolutely ripping her country to the delight of the audience," Dans wrote on X. "Embarassing." He punctuated his post with an American-flag emoji.
This past week in New York City, fifteen inches of snow fell and more than twenty-two hundred snowplows pushed it away. Twelve thousand miles of sidewalk were shovelled. Two hundred and nine million pounds of salt were spread, and, after it got really bad, two hundred thousand gallons of calcium chloride, a chemical ice melt, were deployed. Sometimes the work you do leaves its mark; sometimes it doesn't.
To get back to average snowpack, we essentially need to have the most snow that we've ever had for the last 30 years between now and mid-April. It would be extremely difficult for Colorado to get back to a normal/average snowpack. As an example, when looking at the Independence Pass SNOTEL site in central Colorado outside of Aspen, we typically have 13 inches of snow-water-equivalent at the end of February. This year, we only have 6.7 inches of SWE.
Recently, Anchorage, Alaska's largest city with nearly 400,000 residents, has just recorded its snowiest January on record. Tucked in between the mighty Cook Inlet and pushed right up against the Chugach Mountains, Anchorage sits in prime location for some serious snow totals. Moisture from pacific storms builds up over the inlet, and thanks to orographic lift caused by the mountains, forces that moisture to drop over Anchorage. Thanks to Alaska's northernly location, that moisture often falls in the form of snow.
"A dry January, which is historically the wettest month of the year in California, has now eroded the gains made at the start of the year and forecasts currently show no major precipitation in the next two weeks," California Department of Weather Resources spokesperson Jason Ince wrote in a Jan. 30 news release. The first month of the year certainly left the area warmer and drier than usual, weather officials confirmed.
Climate change which U.S. President Donald Trump calls the greatest con job ever perpetrated in the world is precisely what is driving the push to gain control of Greenland, an ambition openly declared by Trump. Human-caused global warming is reaching record levels in the Arctic region. This triggers ice melt, opening new shipping routes that major powers want to control, as well as theoretically easier access to the island's resources minerals and fossil fuels.
Polar bears are the poster children of climate changeand for good reason. These giant bears hunt, mate and spend their days hanging out on Arctic sea ice, which is rapidly disappearing as the climate warms. But some polar bears, it seems, are far more resilient than we realized: new research suggests that in one region, the bears are adapting to the declining sea ice.