# Are you seeing changes in the weather in your area? **URL:** \ **Category:** In My Humble Opinion\ **Created:** [July 20, 2016, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435 "2016-07-20T17:37:03Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![Mr\_Quatro](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/bc8723/32.png) [@Mr\_Quatro](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mr_Quatro)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 5:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/1 "2016-07-20T17:37:03Z")
In my humble opinion this is going to continue … Are you seeing changes in the weather in your area? [http://www.tjcnewspaper.com/hottest-june-on-record-continues-14-month-global-heat-wave7bb](http://www.tjcnewspaper.com/hottest-june-on-record-continues-14-month-global-heat-wave7bb) > [@](#): > > Global temperatures are continuing to skyrocket, with the first six months of 2016 each setting a new record for the hottest respective month in modern history. The only month that didn’t break records for low sea ice extent was March, and that month recorded the second smallest extent. > > The six-month period from January to June has even surpassed the late nineteenth century climate records, with an average temperature of 1.3 degree Celsius (2.4 degrees Fahrenheit). And now, the latest research shows 2016 may be the hottest year yet. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 5:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/2 "2016-07-20T17:45:51Z")
Lately or over the past few years? In the early 80s, sudden afternoon showers were very predictable in Florida. These got rarer and rarer steadily until nowadays they only happen once a week or so (but it also rains other times of day, sometimes all day, which doesn’t count as a “sudden afternoon shower”.) This year was sort of weird in that the weather was tolerable almost until June, when over the course of a week it shot up to the 90s. ---
**Author:** ![dracoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 5:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/3 "2016-07-20T17:47:29Z")
Yes. Up here in the Seattle neighborhood, what used to be an unusually warm summer now appears to be the standard. We now count days over 90 F the way we used to count days over 80 F. ---
**Author:** ![Ludovic](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/l/7ab992/32.png) [@Ludovic](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ludovic)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 5:51pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/4 "2016-07-20T17:51:56Z")
But to match the increased randomness of the rain, the temperature seems to have moderated slightly also. In the early 80s it wasn’t unusual to have several days over 100 during the summer, and now we don’t always even get 1. And in the 80s and 90s I’ve seen snow several times but have not seen it in the 2000s. ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 6:18pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/5 "2016-07-20T18:18:29Z")
Not really. It hasn’t hit 100 yet this year, but July 20-30 is usually when 100s begin to occur. But the winter seemed bone-chilling. ---
**Author:** ![Smapti](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/smapti/32/17938_2.png) [@Smapti](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Smapti)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 6:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/6 "2016-07-20T18:29:15Z")
> [@dracoi](#): > > Yes. Up here in the Seattle neighborhood, what used to be an unusually warm summer now appears to be the standard. We now count days over 90 F the way we used to count days over 80 F. _This_ summer, however, has been the coldest I’ve seen since I moved up here. ---
**Author:** ![Doyle](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/doyle/32/439_2.png) [@Doyle](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Doyle)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 6:33pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/7 "2016-07-20T18:33:33Z")
New Orleans: Pretty normal. ---
**Author:** ![Tamerlane](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/tamerlane/32/7602_2.png) [@Tamerlane](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tamerlane)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 6:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/8 "2016-07-20T18:40:16Z")
Yep. But I’m in California. Not only has there been persistent drought, but the winters have been ridiculously warm the last couple of years. ---
**Author:** ![Thudlow\_Boink](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/thudlow_boink/32/320_2.png) [@Thudlow\_Boink](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Thudlow_Boink)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 6:44pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/9 "2016-07-20T18:44:14Z")
That’s what the weather _does_: it changes. It’s normal to sometimes have seasons that are abnormally hot (or cold or wet or dry). I haven’t noticed any systematic change, but if there were such, I don’t know that I’d notice it. ---
**Author:** ![GunnarFranz](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/da6949/32.png) [@GunnarFranz](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GunnarFranz)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 6:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/10 "2016-07-20T18:46:26Z")
These are aggregate measurements, the chance of any person noticing observable changes over the course of a few decades is low. I certainly cannot tell a difference in CT. ---
**Author:** ![mtomm](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/df788c/32.png) [@mtomm](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/mtomm)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 7:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/11 "2016-07-20T19:04:58Z")
Our winters have become considerably more mild since my childhood 40+ years ago. Hard to say about summer. This one has been cool and windy. Idaho. ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 7:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/12 "2016-07-20T19:12:48Z")
> [@Thudlow\_Boink](#): > > That’s what the weather _does_: it changes. > > It’s normal to sometimes have seasons that are abnormally hot (or cold or wet or dry). > > I haven’t noticed any systematic change, but if there were such, I don’t know that I’d notice it. Which gets to the fundamental difference between “climate” and “weather”. The lack of understanding that most laymen have about the difference between the two seems to drive at least some of the skepticism about climate change (“What do you mean ‘global warming’? Look at this snowball!”) Here in Chicago, it seems like, in the past few summers, we get heavier rain, more often (but I don’t have the hard data to back this up). I live 4 blocks from Salt Creek; in the past 4 years, we’ve had two instances in which, due to repeated heavy rain events over a period of days, the creek overflowed its banks, flooding the area around it, and coming close to our house. In the previous 16 years we’d been in this house, it’d never happened…and, in talking to our neighbors who have been in the neighborhood for many decades, they didn’t recall it having ever happened before, either. ---
**Author:** ![HMS\_Irruncible](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/hms_irruncible/32/7394_2.png) [@HMS\_Irruncible](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/HMS_Irruncible)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/13 "2016-07-20T19:20:18Z")
This could be purely my perception but it seems like we get more warm, gusty rains than we used to (in the past it would be cool, soaking rains). ---
**Author:** ![spamforbrains](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/e274bd/32.png) [@spamforbrains](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/spamforbrains)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 7:23pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/14 "2016-07-20T19:23:13Z")
Hard to say since it changes all the time and you can only track trends through statistics. ---
**Author:** ![Ethilrist](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/ethilrist/32/4604_2.png) [@Ethilrist](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Ethilrist)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 8:07pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/15 "2016-07-20T20:07:09Z")
In the 20 years or so since I moved to St. Paul, the winters are warmer (takes until January for the temps to go below zero, rather than -15 in the 2nd week in December), there are fewer snowfalls (and not as much snow for each–we used to get 7-8 snowfalls of 5-8 inches apiece; now, we get like 5 with less than an inc and one or two with 6-8), and summers aren’t as consistently hot. So, the weather seems to be getting more moderate, from my own observation. ---
**Author:** ![dracoi](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/d/90db22/32.png) [@dracoi](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/dracoi)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 8:52pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/16 "2016-07-20T20:52:08Z")
> [@Smapti](#): > > _This_ summer, however, has been the coldest I’ve seen since I moved up here. It’s definitely cooler than what we’ve had recently. I haven’t seen a numerical comparison of this summer to the historical norm, so it’s hard to judge just where we fall on a scale of decades. But we did just come out of a freakishly warm winter, didn’t we? ---
**Author:** ![kenobi\_65](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kenobi_65/32/13178_2.png) [@kenobi\_65](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kenobi_65)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 9:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/17 "2016-07-20T21:31:18Z")
> [@dracoi](#): > > But we did just come out of a freakishly warm winter, didn’t we? Last winter (in the Northern Hemisphere), we were experiencing a particularly strong El Nino effect, probably the strongest since the '97-'98 event. El Nino does typically leads to warmer-than-usual winters across the northern U.S. and Canada. > **[Effects of the El Niño–Southern Oscillation in the United States](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effects_of_the_El_Ni%C3%B1o%E2%80%93Southern_Oscillation_in_the_United_States)** > > The El Niño–Southern Oscillation affects the location of the jet stream, which alters rainfall patterns across the West, Midwest, the Southeast, and throughout the tropics. The shift in the jet stream also leads to shifts in the occurrence of severe weather, and the number of tropical cyclones expected within the tropics in the Atlantic and Pacific oceans affected by changes in the ocean temperature and the subtropical jet stream. The winter will have a negative phase according to the Arctic o... ---
**Author:** ![Colibri](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/colibri/32/1841_2.png) [@Colibri](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Colibri)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 10:38pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/18 "2016-07-20T22:38:27Z")
We just had the driest year on record here in Panama, due to the extremely strong El Nino (which causes drought here.) ---
**Author:** ![glowacks](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/glowacks/32/5548_2.png) [@glowacks](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/glowacks)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 11:09pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/19 "2016-07-20T23:09:28Z")
Yes, the weather does change all the time, and there is a very noticeable difference between when it rains and when it’s sunny. Did you perhaps mean climate? I don’t think that’s changing fast enough to be noticeable, although some knock-on effects might be. ---
**Author:** ![Mangosteen](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/6a8cbe/32.png) [@Mangosteen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangosteen)\ **Post date:** [July 20, 2016, 11:45pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435/20 "2016-07-20T23:45:42Z")
I’ve worked outside all day long 5 days a week here in southern California for the last 30 years. I’ve noticed that the last few summers have been cooler than normal. Winters about the same as they normally are. [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/are-you-seeing-changes-in-the-weather-in-your-area/760435.md?page=2)