PMEL in the News
When Washington freezes, so do invasive bugs
You can thank this cold weather for making Washington's forests healthier in the new year. Forests, and backyard gardens, rely on bouts of cold weather to kill off invasive pests. State climatologist Nick Bond has one particular bug in mind: the bark beetle. They take advantage of mild conditions, like Washington experienced the past two winters in a row.
Beneath the waves or underground, warming Alaska poses multiple threats
When you talk to climatologists about 2016, the phrase “mind-boggling” comes up a lot. “For crying out loud, yesterday it was 36 degrees in Barrow, Alaska, in the middle of winter,” said Rick Fritsch, a climate expert for the National Weather Service in Juneau. “If that doesn’t make the point, I don’t know what does. That’s not supposed to happen, at least not in the world I used to live in.”
The Polar Vortex Is Back, and a Warmer Arctic May Be to Blame
RESIDENTS OF ANCHORAGE, Alaska, found themselves enjoying a stretch of relatively balmy weather this past December, with temperatures at times climbing above freezing. More southerly cities near the Canada-U.S. border, meanwhile, sat in the grip of a deep freeze, with some double-digit temperature drops triggering extreme cold weather alerts.
Grab Your Ear Muffs, the New Year’s Arriving With a Frigid Bang
A deep freeze is about to descend on North America, Europe and Asia thanks to record high temperatures across the Arctic. How’s that? “Think of it like a seesaw,” said Matt Rogers, president of Commodity Weather Group LLC in Bethesda, Maryland. If winter temperatures rise north of Alaska, that “forces an equal-opposite downward-southward push. The cold essentially has to go somewhere else.”
Starting off 2017 with an actual Seattle freeze
It will be a cold start to 2017 in the Seattle area. Forecasters say that as the ball drops New Year's Eve, a cold front starts moving into the northwest from Canada. Washington state's climatologist, Nick Bond, is monitoring the weather pattern.