April 2012: Earth's 5th warmest on record
April 2012 was the globe's 5th warmest April on record, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). NASA rated April 2012 as the 4th warmest April on record. April 2012 global land temperatures were the 2nd warmest on record, and the Northern Hemisphere land surface temperature was 1.74°C (3.13°F) above the 20th century average, marking the warmest April since records began in 1880. Global ocean temperatures were the 11th warmest on record, and April 2012 was the 427th consecutive month with ocean temperatures warmer than the 20th century average. The last time the ocean temperatures were below average was September 1976. The increase in global temperatures relative to average compared to March 2012 (16th warmest March on record) was due, in part, to warming waters in the Eastern Pacific, due to the La Niña event that ended in April. Global satellite-measured temperatures for the lowest 8 km of the atmosphere were 6th or 4th warmest in the 34-year record, according to Remote Sensing Systems and the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH). April temperatures in the stratosphere were the 1st to 4th coldest on record. We expect cold temperatures there due to the greenhouse effect and to destruction of ozone due to CFC pollution. Northern Hemisphere snow cover during April was 4th smallest in the 46-year record. Wunderground's weather historian, Christopher C. Burt, has a comprehensive post on the notable weather events of April in his April 2012 Global Weather Extremes Summary. Notably, national heat records (for warmest April temperature on record) occurred in the United States (a tie), Germany, Austria, Poland, Belarus, Lithuania, Moldova, Hungry, Croatia, Ukraine, and Slovakia as well as the cities of Moscow and Munich.
Figure 1. Departure of temperature from average for April 2012. The most notable extremes were the warmth observed across Russia, the United States, Alaska, and parts of the Middle East and eastern Europe. There were no land areas with large-scale cold conditions of note. Image credit: National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) .
La Niña officially ends
According to NOAA's Climate Prediction Center (CPC), La Niña conditions are no longer present in the equatorial Pacific, where sea surface temperatures were approximately average as of May 13. The threshold for a La Niña is for these temperatures to be 0.5°C below average or cooler. CPC forecasts that neutral conditions will persist though the summer, with a 41% chance of an El Niño event developing in time for the August - September - October peak of hurricane season. El Niño conditions tend to decrease Atlantic hurricane activity, by increasing wind shear over the tropical Atlantic.
Figure 2. Arctic sea ice extent in 2012 (blue line) compared to the average (thick grey line.) The record low year of 2007 (dashed green line) is also shown. Arctic sea ice was near average during April, but has fallen well below average during the first half of May. Image credit: National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC).
April Arctic sea ice extent near average
Arctic sea ice extent was near average in April 2012, the 17th lowest (18th greatest) extent in the 35-year satellite record, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC). This was the largest April Arctic sea ice extent since 2001. However, ice in the Arctic is increasingly young, thin ice, which will make it easy for this year's ice to melt away to near-record low levels this summer, if warmer than average weather occurs in the Arctic.
Figure 2. Mt. St. Helens in Washington State erupting on May 18, 1980. Image credit: USGS.
Anniversary of the eruption of Mt. St. Helens
Today is the 32nd anniversary of the May 18th, 1980 eruption of Mt. St. Helens in Washington State. To mark the occasion, NASA has put together a cool Landsat satellite time lapse of 32 years of regrowth of surrounding forest. The USGS has an extensive informational site on the eruption.
Video 1. In Grand Isle, Louisiana last week, a large waterspout came ashore as an EF-1 tornado. The tornado ripped the roof off of the house across the street from this videographer, who should have taken shelter instead of filming the destruction. There's one 4-letter word in the video. Thanks go to Andrew Freedman of Climate Central for posting this.
Have a great weekend, everyone! I'll be back Sunday or Monday with a new post.
Jeff Masters
Reader Comments
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If you take in the evidence, like machu picchu stonework
And how did those Sands in India and Pakistan,Libya get vitrified ?, only Thermonuclear Blasts can do that in a desert.
The LibyanDesert Glass Puzzle.
Surprised your results are so different from the NWS West Palm Beach April summery which had West Palm Beach at 0.3º above average for that month..
My point is that everyone is taking a microscopic view of global warming. From your chart we can go back and say its been warming for 40 years. BFD! From this logic, we can take a batters performance during the first two games of the season where he goes 3-4 and 4-5 and say he's an all-star, an MVP, and say he's going to bat over .750 all year. Well, we know that's not going to happen.
My other point is that through this microscopic view, this allows the government to put up more regulations, which inhibit businesses and growth, and clamor for higher taxes. All because the Earth may be warming.
At any rate, back to rarely reading this blog and never posting. You can fight amongst yourselves.
8 FLWeatherFreak91: Shoot it next time if you can. Defend the constitution! You don't need anyone watching you fish.
There is nothing in the Constitution about being watched while fishing or guaranteeing freedom from being watched in public spaces.
Why would one care about being watched under such circumstances? Now the noise of aircraft flying overhead while one is trying to enjoy the peace of the wilds might make one wanna go ballistic...
10 jeffs713: I think the gov't would have some issue with people carrying a gun while "kayaking" near said government installation - especially when there is not a legitimate reason to be carrying a piece there. What are you going to do? Shoot a fish?
Shooting fish with a firearm is illegal (until after its been landed).
However Florida law states that darn near anyone can carry firearms, including concealed handguns.
It also states that one can protect oneself by killing folks whom one reasonably perceives as behaving in a threatening manner.
The only function of a handgun is to commit homicide. So one can reasonably assume that the handgun carrier is threatening to commit homicide, especially since one can't outrun a bullet.
Since handguns can be legally concealed, the lack of a visible handgun does not reduce the threat.
And since perceiving a threat of assault upon ones person is legal grounds to protect oneself by committing homicide, then one would want to carry a rifle to do so: more accurate and greater range.
Frankly I don' know why folks would wanna live where bein' out in public while clothed is grounds for bein' legally executed. But I guess it takes all kinds...
Wow! Fifth warmest April on record in 132 years! Incredible. Be careful out there guys. Oh wait, how old is the Earth.
Neo's reply:
I've never really understood this particular argument. It seems sort of like claiming that a bullet fired from a high-powered rifle can't possibly hurt you since you've lived for many years--decades, even--while the bullet will pass through your body in just a millisecond.
More accurately, the argument seems to be that a bullet fired from a high-powered rifle aimed at your chest can't possibly hurt you since there have been other bullets fired throughout the ages when you were not not around and those bullets did you no harm.
Note the numbers trend last 12 mth's, and esp last month.
co2now.org
396.18ppm
Oh, I see, but anyway, we did have a few days where there were near record low temperatures for the month of April. But I guess the rest of the month was abnormally warm?
A spring dust wall from storms down in Tucson made it's way up Interstate 10 on May 9th. It grew in strength and density along the way. The first portion of the timelapse was shot north of Casa Grande, halfway to Phoenix. The second clip was on the southern outskirts of Phoenix. Photographer Mike Olbinski got caught up in the dust cloud a few times and raced out of it in order to capture it's arrival!
On the leading edge of the wall of dust you can see some pretty intense "gustnados" spin up. There was actually damage done to homes in Queen Creek that is being blamed on a gustnado. Crazy to have a fairly large haboob already in May! For more, visit Mike Olbinski
Photography at http://www.mikeolbinski.com
No, scientists are not tanking a microscopic view of global warming. What is happening right now is being looked both in terms of what we are currently experiencing and what has happened during previous periods of radical warming on the planet.
It's just that current warming is what we need to pay the most attention to, we didn't have to live through other very hot cycles, this one is ours.
Slowing warming by getting off of fossil fuels will not inhibit business and growth. It simply means that we need to change how we do things.
Rather than driving cars fuels by petroleum we need to switch to cars powered by electricity (or less likely hydrogen). We don't need to kill the car companies, we just need to change gas motors to electric engines.
Rather than powering our grid with coal and natural gas we need to move to wind, solar, geothermal, hydro, tidal, wave, and biogas/mass. Rather than drilling holes in the ground and ripping the tops off mountains we need to install wind turbines and solar panels.
It's not that the "Earth may be warming". The Earth is warming and at an alarming rate. Never, in the historical record, has the Earth warmed as fast as it now is warming.
If we don't slow and eventually stop the warming we are causing we will deliver ourselves a world of hurt.
Here ya go:
(ok... now that I'm done being smart...
http://www.ssd.noaa.gov/goes/east/watl/loop-wv.ht ml
(hardly any convection)
We get your point. But your point is not valid. The earth could be 1000yrs old and C02 and methane would still be greenhouse gases, and would warm the planet at the same rate of the energy imbalance that their accumulation causes. Going far back in earth's history, the earth is different in many more ways which would make that climate even more irrelevant to today's climate (see plate tectonics, for example). We do not need to know the exact climate 1 billion years ago to know what greenhouse gases will do today.... the physics has not changed.
Your political opinions have no relevancy to science. It seems like you are going backwards, starting with things you don't like and rationalizing that you don't have to do them by attacking the evidence suggesting otherwise.
But if you want to go there...
Just wait until climate reaches a point where we have serious food/water/energy shortages. It's manageable now, but that won't last. Taking care of it now is preventing regulations, higher taxes, and sluggish business growth.
That is exactly the argument some make each and every day. And it reflects heavily upon those individuals' critical thinking abilities.
"Redford 'shocked' Mulcair dismissed western premiers"
The Premier of Alberta is telling the leader of the Federal Opposition that he should apologize for mentioning that "Petro Dollars" can turn your head around. Looks like Mulcair called it. A number of western Canadian Province leaders look like denyalists this morn.
Turns out (according to them) we SHOULD pump tar into coastal waters and be happy to subsidize the project. We get a bunch of imaginary yuan in return
Daily SOI:-5.73
30 day SOI: 3.26
Now imagine that 17 days being 90-100 days with 100 degree temperatures. Oh how I hated 2011.
(Or, as Arthur C. Clarke put it: Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.)
But I don't think you'd need 100,000 years to see such change. Imagine were someone from just 100 years ago brought around. What would they think of the internet? Thermonuclear weapons? The ISS? Microwave ovens, television, iPads?
If they came from the backcountry, about what they woulda felt visiting NewYorkCity 100years ago. It'd be a one-day wonder, then it'd be time to get on with using the tech that's available.
(Don' wanna look like a hick)
Probably the same with Neanderthals and CroMagnons if dropped into the present.
Probably the same with us if dropped tens-of-thousands of years into the future.
Any sufficiently advanced magic looks like technology.
Which is pret' much where most people come from: it ain't as if they have even the vaguest idea about what's happening between flipping a switch or pushing a button and the result.
So except for the extremely gullible, we ain't never been all that impressed by magic*...
* Prestidigitation, on the other hand, is impressive.
Ya know they're foolin' ya, and ya can go nuts tryin' to see how.
Look at weapons, for example. In the greco-roman area, the best individual weapons were pikes, spears, swords, and bows. Now, they are guns, knives, and bigger guns. They will both kill you just the same. The only difference is the vast technology difference between them. I'm pretty sure a greek soldier can quickly figure out with a gun that one end shoots fire and death, while the other kicks like a mule.
It would be amazing to them for a bit, but eventually they would figure it out.
Thanks
The link to the main page.
The daily ice extent graph
And the data set, updated daily.
Dude what are you looking at? Go take a look at the GFS wind shear forecast. 30 knots or higher wind shear is expected in the NW Caribbean in 48 hours with 20-25 knots across the rest of the Caribbean. It'll lower some afterwards, but not until after 48-72 hours.
is a new paper Albedo evolution of seasonal Arctic sea ice
The entire paper is available here.
What are you praying for? ;)
the East Coast hurricane visible loop
I see 35 kts of shear not 20. Also shear is increasing.
I really wonder what GFS your are looking at I just took a look at the GFS and it show it stronger but nothing to what you are saying GFS is saying
20-25kt in 24 15-20kt in 36 and 10-20kt in 48
With 25 to 40 kts of shear ?
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