US weather: East coast freezes while California enjoys record winter temperatures

Weather extremes set record high and low temperatures

Contrasting weather extremes hit America this week, blanketing much of the country in snow as the West Coast saw record warmth.

While scientists avoid attributing individual weather events to climate change given the complex multitude of factors that drive weather, the dichotomy on display – with new temperature records being set on both ends of the thermometer – offered evidence of the types of extraordinary weather likely to become more common as the climate shifts.

“It’s the trend and the numbers, and there has been a noticeable trend in the numbers of these events,” said Mark Jackson, meteorologist in charge for the National Weather Service in Los Angeles. “We’ve had very extreme cold before, we’re had extreme heat before, but what’s happening is we’re seeing an increase in the numbers of those events.”

People throughout the eastern and midwestern United States were contending with thick blankets of snow and frigid temperatures. Some parts of New York state were colder than Antarctica.

Plummeting temperatures broke records in several states. The town of International Falls, Minnesota saw the temperature plunge -38C; temperatures in the Baltimore, Maryland area tied or fell below the lowest recorded in recent decades; and residents of Kentucky and Missouri endured record cold.

With the freeze came snow, often in record amounts. The town of Erie, Pennsylvania was digging out after being inundated with several feet of snow in the past week, with more than four feet falling in a 24-hour period and a storm dumping over five feet of snow total.

Severe winter storms were impeding mobility, leading state officials to restrict commercial trucking as cities opened warming centres and implored homeless people to seek shelter from potentially deadly cold. In New England, scientists were investigating whether dead sharks had succumbed to the cold.

But while millions of people broke out snow shovels and sweaters, residents of California were seeing the opposite as unseasonably high temperatures surpassed winter records.

In the last week, multiple towns in southern California broke previous temperature records - at times repeatedly. The city of Sandberg recorded new highs for six consecutive days, culminating in 21C. Temperatures in Woodland Hills, a section of Los Angeles, soared to 31C.

Weather maps showed the eastern part of the United States coated in a gelid blue while the West Coast was painted a sunny orange. Helping to quantify the vast temperature gulf, the National Weather Service reported that the peak national temperature was 31C in Lake Elsinore, California; the nadir was -39C in upstate New York near the Canadian border.

Unseasonably warm and dry California weather helped create the conditions that allowed a series of formidable wildfires to engulf hundreds of thousands of acres across southern California this month, fire officials and weather experts say. Such blazes have historically been rare in the cooler, wetter winter months, but there is evidence a shifting climate is changing that.

Record heat notwithstanding, Donald Trump used plummeting temperatures to again broadcast his scepticism of climate change.

“In the East, it could be the COLDEST New Year’s Eve on record,” the President wrote on Twitter. “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming that our Country, but not other countries, was going to pay TRILLIONS OF DOLLARS to protect against. Bundle up”!

When it comes to interpreting climate change – a term scientists prefer to global warming – Mr Jackson cautioned against a parochial view limited to the weather outside a person’s window.

“It’s your own backyard you experience. It’s very easy to think ‘well, this is unusual that it’s so cold here,’ but you have to step outside and look at the bigger picture,“ Mr Jackson said. ”A warming climate isn’t about everything warming. It’s about these extreme events, and we’re seeing that happening now”.

Weather is not the same as climate. But scientists say a warming climate could help fuel the types of weather extremes on display this week.

“There is research that indicates changes in our climate as the Earth warms, and especially warming of the arctic region, are leading to a ‘wavier’ jet stream, which means it can be more likely to have these sorts of southward plunges of cold weather in one portion of the country while there is a northward push of warm weather in another,” said Keith Seitter, executive director of the American Meteorological Society.