Some More Observations About the Recent, Unusual Weather

A couple of other things I heard meteorologist Joe Bastardi mention in the radio interview I heard recently is that the cold air on Earth is fighting back against the warm air like in the 1950s and that the snowfall in the Western U.S. Mountains is comparable to the record snowfall seen in the early 1950s.

Bastardi’s observations about the 1950s got me curious about whether some of the weather conditions we have seen recently on Earth also were seen in the 1950s. I decided to examine some weather data and other sources to see whether some of the weather conditions we have seen recently also were seen in the 1950s.

• Today I share some of my observations with you.

I looked up historical weather records for my area of California and found that the weather during the early 1950s was eerily similar to the weather I’ve seen recently. For instance, the weather records for June 1952 showed that temperatures were unseasonably cool throughout most of the month and that it rained on several days during the month.

A reader from Texas commented that someone living in the area for many decades told him that he has not seen the type of drought that is currently ongoing in Texas since the 1950s. I searched for information concerning the drought that Texas experienced in the 1950s to see when the drought occurred during that decade. The following passage from NOAA describes the type of drought conditions seen in Texas during the early 1950s:

The 1950s drought was characterized by both low rainfall amounts and excessively high temperatures. Texas rainfall dropped by 40% between 1949-1951 and by 1953, 75% of Texas recorded below normal rainfall amounts. Excessive temperatures heated up cities like Dallas where temperatures exceeded 100°F on 52 days in the summer of 1953.

It seems my area of California and the state of Texas have recently experienced the same type of weather conditions as was seen in the early 1950s.

I also looked to see whether Northern Europe experienced a drought in the 1950s similar to the one that it is currently being experienced today. I found an academic article from the Journal of Climate studying the severity of various droughts that took place during the second half of the 20th century. The article shows on Page 1968:

• A map of a large drought that covered a large portion of the United States in the 1950s.
• Three maps of a drought that encompassed much of Europe in the early to mid 1950s.
• A map of a drought that took place in parts of Central China in the early 1950s.

Based on what I saw, there appears to be some similarities between the recent weather and the weather experienced in the early 1950s at some locations around the world, including my own.

• Interestingly, some meteorologists blame the recent droughts in Texas and other unusual weather events around the world on a sea surface temperature anomaly called La Nina, which is when the sea surface temperatures are colder than normal in the equatorial Pacific. From June 2010 to May 2011 we experienced the one of the strongest La Nina events on record. Interestingly, the La Nina we just experienced is comparable in strength to the La Nina of 1949-1950, the sixth strongest La Nina on record.

There are a lot of variables that influence the weather including sea surface temperature anomalies (La Nina and El Nino), the amount of energy Earth receives from the sun, the amount of volcanic dust in the atmosphere, etc, so it would be extremely unlikely for weather patterns in the future to follow the weather patterns of the 1950s exactly. However, if the weather does follow a similar pattern as the weather pattern of the 1950s I would be concerned about the potential for a more severe drought in the U.S. in the coming years. The drought of the early 1950s expanded a few years later to cover much of the country.

• The following link will take you to a website with an interactive map where you can see how a localized drought spread to cover much the United States, including the corn belt, from 1950 to 1956.

It’s difficult to accurately forecast what the weather is going to be like in the long-term, but it is safe to say that the weather continues to be unusual at the moment.

• To illustrate how odd the current weather is in some parts of the world, some parts of China which were experiencing the worst drought in 50 years are now dealing with flood waters after several days of heavy rains. One area of China received 4.8 inches of rain in just one hour, a rainfall rate which has not been seen in that area in 200 years.

The weather is beginning to dry out where I live, but temperatures remain relatively cool for June. Given how unusual the weather has been this year, I’m not too optimistic about the prospects for a normal summer of dry, hot weather where I live even though forecasters say that the sea surface temperature anomaly in the Pacific has disappeared.