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Snow, rain and wind: unpacking a week of very strange weather

HOUGHTON — Last weekend, it seemed as if typical Copper County winter weather had finally come to stay. Temperatures were below freezing, plow trucks were out in force, and fresh snow blanketed the peninsula’s hills and valleys.

But on Monday, temperatures climbed above freezing, and by Wednesday afternoon, much of the fluffy white snow that seemed so permanent just a few days earlier, had melted away. The peculiar weather was just getting started. On Thursday morning, Yoopers awoke to powerful gusts of wind that shook houses and knocked out power for parts of the day.

To make sense of this strange week of weather, National Weather Service meteorologist Matt Zika spoke with the Gazette on Wednesday afternoon.

“There’s no doubt that we’re seeing a very unusual weather event unfold, not just here in Upper Michigan but across the country,” he said.

“But when we look at the overall impacts here in Upper Michigan, it’s not that unusual for us to have some mild stretches in December, where it may be cold and snowy for a while and then we get a few days of mild weather, and then it goes back to cold again. That’s what we’re going to see this time around.”

Zika explained that while mild December temperatures are not unusual, the low-pressure system responsible for Thursday’s severe wind is a different story.

“We’re going to see winds [Thursday] gusting over 60 miles per hour, especially across the Keweenaw for much of the day. There will probably be some power outages,” he said.

“When we look historically at the magnitude of the low-pressure system, this is kind of a once every five to seven-year type of storm,” he continued. “It’s not something that we see every year, it is fairly unusual but it’s not unprecedented.”

The warm air and low-pressure system are not isolated to the U.P. These conditions were felt across the Midwest region and central portion of the country. Temperatures in Minneapolis reached 70 F this week, and a deadly wave of tornadoes swept across six states.

In Kentucky, thousands of homes were damaged or destroyed by tornadoes, and more than 74 people were killed. Rescuers continue to search for more than 100 people who remain unaccounted for.

“Anytime you see very warm air temperatures in the 60s and 70s up into Illinois and the Ohio Valley during the month of December, it’s a recipe for bad things to happen,” Zika explained. “The ingredients came together to wind up a big area of low pressure and cause the high winds and the storminess that we saw just a few days ago with the terrible tornadoes.”

When asked about the possible role of global climate change in these odd weather patterns, Zika cautioned that meteorologists must be careful not to conflate weather – the short-term atmospheric conditions – with climate – atmospheric conditions over a long period of time.

“One specific weather incident doesn’t necessarily mean that this is the new normal,” he explained. “Whether or not there may be a small role because things are warmer now than they used to be, you could probably say that is true. But to say specifically that these weather events that occurred across the country over the last week are solely due to climate change, we’re not there yet. We can’t make that direct connection.”

Although it is impossible to draw a direct causal connection between climate change and one specific weather event, scientists do believe that global warming contributes to more frequent and severe weather patterns, according to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

In 2021, extreme weather events including storms, heatwaves, and drought broke records around the world. Approximately half of the U.S. experienced abnormal drought during the summer of 2021, and in California, wildfires raged over more than two million acres of land.

Globally, 2020 was the second hottest year on record, with all of the top ten hottest years occurring since 2005. The EPA predicts that temperatures will increase by at least 2.7 °F, and possibly as much as 8.6°F in the next century. As temperatures continue to rise, severe weather is likely to become more prevalent.

But in the near future, Yoopers can expect normal winter weather for the remainder of the season. Zika said that temperatures will return to the 20s during the day and teens at night, with some light lake-effect snow over the weekend.

“The indications are that for the remainder of our winter, as we head through the end of December into January and February, is a much more typical winter weather pattern for us here in the upper Great Lakes,” he said. “We will go through some spells where it will be colder or milder, but there definitely will be more snow fall than we saw last year. We will have more lake effect snow and a much more typical winter.”

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