March 2012 will go down as the warmest March in the United States since record-keeping began in 1895, NOAA said Monday.
In addition, the three-month period of January, February and March was the warmest first quarter ever recorded in the Lower 48 states. The average was 42 degrees Fahrenheit, a whopping 6 degrees above the long-term average.
A staggering 15,292 warm temperature records were broken, (7,755 record highs and 7,517 record high overnight lows), according to Chris Vaccaro, spokesperson for NOAA. “That’s tremendously excessive. The scope and the scale of warmth was really unprecedented, Vaccaro said.
A persistent weather pattern during the month of March led to 25 states east of the Rockies having their warmest March on record, NOAA said. That same pattern was responsible for cooler-than-average conditions in the West Coast states of Washington, Oregon and California, they said.
The warm temperatures also contributed to conditions that were favorable for severe thunderstorms and tornadoes. There were 223 preliminary tornado reports during March, a month that averages 80 tornadoes, according to NOAA’s Storm Prediction Center. The majority of these tornadoes occurred during a severe weather outbreak across the Ohio River Valley and Southeast in early March. The outbreak caused 40 deaths and total losses of $1.5 billion, making it the first billion-dollar disaster of 2012.
Short-term weather patterns such as the one that affected the United States are poor indicators of global climate trends, however. Parts of the world, most notably Eastern Europe, experienced below-average to extreme cold temperatures this winter.
(Source: CNN)
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2 Responses
They are gaming the system. Usually when one talks of “recorded history” one is talking about records going back to the beginning of written records which date back 5000 years ago. When NOAA (and the other’s profiting by pushing a green agenda) talkes about “recorded history” they only go back as far as their agency’s origins in the just over 200 years ago.
If all written records are included, including accounts of which rivers froze and when, which crops grew where, etc., it becomes apparent it was warmer during the early middle ages, and also in “classical times” (what we would call Bayis Sheini times). When they ask for money for “climate change”, we should remind them that the climate routines varies without or without funding NOAA.
1. You are correct but I believe I saw in the story that NOAA’s “recorded” history began a bit more than 100 years ago.