Baby, It's Cold Outside

This is Lake Erie last night. Photo by Tim Oehm. pic.twitter.com/FGdLUthmv2

— The Canadian Border (@border_canadian) December 24, 2022

Brrr!

As you are no doubt aware, much of the United States is now experiencing a bomb cyclone, with associated extremely low temperatures, blizzards, and extremely high winds.

Yesterday, we saw 7°F (-14°C) in Owings Mills, MD and high winds, though no blizzard.

Needless to say, in addition to blizzards and dozens of deaths, there has been widespread disruption of airline flights over one of the busiest weekends of the year:

A wild winter storm enveloped much of the US on Saturday, bringing blizzards, freezing rain, flooding and intense cold close to record lows. More than a dozen deaths were attributed to the storm. Holiday travel and utilities were disrupted, with around 1.4 million homes and businesses left without power by late afternoon.

Forecasters said the storm, a “bomb cyclone” or “bombogenesis”, was caused by a collision of cold, dry air from the north and warm, moist air from the south.

More than 200 million people were under some form of winter advisory or warning in “one of the greatest extents of winter weather warnings and advisories ever”, the National Weather Service (NWS) said.

As the system pushed as far south as Texas, many faced the coldest Christmas Eve for decades. The storm, named Elliott, downed power lines, littered highways with accidents and led to mass flight cancellations. It stretched 2,000 miles from the Great Lakes near Canada to the Rio Grande along the Mexico border. Temperatures were drastically below normal from the Rockies to the Appalachians.

I will break my embargo on blogging at work to note that we lost power on Friday at work, and we all had to go home 3 hours early.

Thankfully, there is no such power loss at home.

These events are described as once in a century, but they have become increasingly common as a result of global warming.