Derek Arndt, who heads the climate monitoring branch at NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., said the new data should be viewed in the context of the record retreat of snow cover in the Northern Hemisphere at the end of the melt season and a near-record retreat of Arctic sea ice.
“Together across the board, it was an unusual year, and a year that in many ways was a culmination of what we’ve been seeing for the past several years,” Arndt said.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/
Record retreat meaning second largest winter snow cover on record.
h/t to Marc Morano
Same day, same time, same newspaper
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Posted at 7:00 PM ET, 01/12/2011
More than 70 percent of U.S. covered in snow
By Jason Samenow
Washington, D.C. climbs out of snow hole
snow-cover-jan2011.jpg
Snow cover on Jan 11 (left) and 12 (right). Snow cover decreased between the two days in the Deep South but increased over Illinois and in the mid-Atlantic. Source: National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center.
Tuesday morning, 69% of the contiguous U.S. and 49 out of 50 states had snow on the ground, but not the Washington, D.C. metro region.
Thanks in part to the East Coast storm Tuesday night, the snow covered region has risen to 71% Wednesday and now includes Washington, D.C. based on imagery and analysis from the National Weather Service (NWS).
The snow cover across the U.S. – boosted by the recent major winter storm in the Deep South – is more than double the snow cover last month.
An NWS official told Live Science (as quoted in Christian Science Monitor) that the such extensive snow cover is “not typical”. However, because NWS does not have long-term U.S. snow cover records, statistical comparisons cannot be made with past years.
haha.
the sierra snowpack peaked in may and did not start melting until june last year.
now consider it has been starting to accumulate in october, and you have 3 extra months of snowcover.
retreating my ass.
He cherry picked a time frame just so his global warming looked real.
“However, because NWS does not have long-term U.S. snow cover records, statistical comparisons cannot be made with past years.”
This never stops them claiming that something is “unprecedented in 10,000 years” if it happens to promote the Global Warming agenda (Arctic Sea Ice, cough).
Some government agents go when they sit and spin.
Not to mention the record winter snow extent for North America.
Washington DC area using this logic had a record snowmelt season last year, being that they set all-time seasonal snow records. Unbelievable indeed.
Maybe I am wrong, but doesn’t large snow extent (more now farther south) mean faster melting? Hmmmm.
If it’s this cold flying in the face of tremendous human caused warming, I would believe that if humans were not putting greenhouse gases into the atmosphere that we would now be in a dangerous Little Ice Age if not an all out Ice Age.
The irony is that those who would save the planet might actually be putting the planet in far greater peril.
Remember when wapo used to almost be credible?
Me either.