whathappenedtomonday's Journal: 2006 warmest year on record in the U.S

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) reports that 2006 was the warmes year on record in the US. "No cause for alarm. Enjoy it while you have it," said Mike Halpert, head of forecast operations at the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center. Jeff Masters disagrees and "had a lot of trouble enjoying the phenomenally warm weather of the past month here in Michigan." Dr. Jeff Masters' WunderBlog at wunderground.com as usual has lots of interesting graphs and charts.

Very Warm in Canada Too

[Coryoth]

It has certainly been a warm winter for much of Canada. For the first time in recorded history various Canadian cities such as Quebec City and Thunder Bay missed out on a white christmas. On the other hand we are currently heading back into an El Nino trend so we would be expecting some cyclical warming anyway. Combine that with the fact that the uncharacteristic warmth has been somewhat regional (BC has been hit by a large number of very bad storms and has had uncharacteristic snow) and it becomes hard to

Re:

[whathappenedtomonday]

Interesting, thanks! The weak El Nino event certainly plays a role, especially for North America. Here in Europe, uncharacteristicly warm weather and lack of snow causes a lot of uneasiness, but I think it's not the warmth but the cumulation in extreme weather conditions that should alarm us. Where I sit, we have 17C / 62.6F and sunshine, so temperatures are still rising. Japan OTOH is (once again) drowning in snow. [metblogs.com] While we're certainly going to see more warm weather, I guess that all weather conditions a