The Disastrous Winter Of 1976-1977

6 Responses to The Disastrous Winter Of 1976-1977

1. Tony Duncan says:

   April 16, 2011 at 5:07 am

   I remember that winter is the snowiest in my memory. I was a freshmen studying Astrophysics a the U of R and it snowed EVERY day, at least flurries for something like 50 days in a row. i think Buffalo had their largest accumulation in decades and numerous people died because they were unable to get out of their houses or something. I enjoyed it.

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2. BT Harley says:

   April 16, 2011 at 7:19 am

   that house for under thirty thousand advertised wouldn’t still be available would it, seeing your house prices are low? Or is it buried under global warming…

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3. Andy Weiss says:

   April 16, 2011 at 10:19 am

   There was a huge upper ridge out west with an anomalously deep polar vortex way south of it’s normal position (near the Great Lakes) during the 1976-77 winter.

   The result was warm and dry out west, with record cold over the Midwest, South and East. It snowed all the way down to Homestead, FL.

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   • Julien Peter Benney says:

     November 1, 2016 at 10:27 am

     That winter was oddly given the cold-related fuel shortages for which it stands notorious the beginning of man-made global warming as we know it today. Despite its cold in the heavily populated East, globally the winter of 1976/1977 was much warmer than any northern winter since 1960/1961, and only 1943/1944 had been clearly warmer since records began.

     Between 1968/1969 and 1975/1976, Alaska had had a succession of abnormally cold winters even by its frigid standards. In fact, Alaska had had five of its seven coldest extended winters within eight years (see at ‘http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/time-series/us/50/0/tavg/6/3/1925-2016?base_prd=true&firstbaseyear=1926&lastbaseyear=1976&trend=true&trend_base=10&firsttrendyear=1977&lasttrendyear=2016&filter=true&filterType=binomial’). The winter of 1975/1976, which was the warmest for 22 years in the contiguous states as a whole, was the coldest on record in Nome, and exceptionally cold in the rest of Alaska.

     November 1976 was the warmest on record in Fairbanks to that point (broken in 1979), and January 1977 saw either record warmth or the warmest since 1937 or 1926 everywhere in Alaska bar the North Slope (warmest since 1957) and the Aleutians (warmest since 1963). February was if equally mild – warmest since 1962 in the North Slope, Aleutians and West Coast, since 1959 or 1942 in the Interior, and on record to that point in the more southerly mainland districts. So anomalous were the temperatures in January 1977 that Anchorage averaged about 3 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than Atlanta! Since 1976/1977, Alaska has had no more than four winters colder than its pre-1976 average.

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4. DERise says:

   April 16, 2011 at 10:52 am

   I remember that season, bought a season ticket and spent more time on rocks than snow. Miserable, brings back bad memories.

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