Another one to add to the collection of “ways in which we’re throwing off planetary processes”. It’s actually getting a little exhausting thinking about all the ways in which we can measure our impact in terms of “unheard of in the past X millions of years”.
I assume this is measured in micro or milli seconds, otherwise you could imagine it starting to exacerbate temperature extremes on a perceptible level due to the lengthening day/night cycle.
Yes, the increase in length of day (ΔLOD) due to climate change is estimated at around +1.33 ms/cy (milliseconds per century) but is growing.
To put that in perspective, the increase in ΔLOD due to tidal friction caused by the moon is around +2.4 ms/cy, but due to reduction of earth’s oblateness partially compensating in the other direction, the net ΔLOD due to the moon is around +1.72 ms/cy. Under the worst-case RCP 8.5 climate scenario, by the end of the 21st century the ΔLOD due to climate change may exceed that of the moon.
I posted what for me was a link to the full paper. I see that this link now provides only an abstract. My apologies for whatever games JGR is playing in restricting their content.
And now the rest of the country is getting in on the action. Yeesh
I wonder if there’s an equivalent map that measures the current temperature against anything except from this month. Have the temps in the northern west gone down significantly, or have they stayed within a degree or two and thus would have been the all time monthly high except for the most recent record?
It’s still very much with us everywhere, just not quite to the same degree as before.
I’ve seen some visualizations of this on social media trying to capture things relative to temps before March.
From here:
That said, this is reposts of people whose stuff I’ve never seen before. So, ya know, caution I guess.
We’ll probably need to wait until the month is out and then maybe something official from NWS or the like will get created.
Also, you can sort of infer the answer to your question from the coolwx maps. Anything without a dot is at least 3 degrees off from the all time daily record. It’s highly unlikely that anything >3 degrees off the daily record would be approaching the previous monthly record set before 2026.
Unfortunately, we don’t have any better gradation for how far below it might be unless someone has a better resource. Is it 5 degrees below daily? 10? 
Probably not worthy of its own thread, but apparently the Guardian is getting in on the Hiroshimas per second scale of energy imbalance:
I don’t know what it says about us as a species that we gravitate towards explaining powerful things in terms of nuclear explosions, but there ya go
And in heat wave related news, we’re back to normal-ish temps a lot of places, but the west is heating up for a third lap. Reading the full analysis after this all shakes out is going to be fascinating.
I’m a little bit suspicious of this map trying to make it look more extreme than it really is.
It says Trenton was within 3 degrees of record high on March 22? According to Weather Underground, they hit 70, the record high was 79 (in 1938!) And today the high is 47.
I don’t know if that’s Trenton or Philadelphia or somewhere in between. There are lots of weather stations out there. Trenton appears to be ~9 degrees off the record, Philadelphia ~5 degrees off. Seems possible that another station in the area got within 3 degrees (especially if its service history doesn’t extend back to 1938). That entire area is clearly right on the edge of the heat dome’s effect for that day.
Not sure I’d make the leap from that to suspicion personally. It’s arguably the most anomalous temperature related event we’ve ever seen and it stretched across most of the country. I don’t know how you make that seem more extreme than it is.
A little too late to edit. Found the map view in the NWS almanac and clicked around a bit. My best guess is that dot is the Northeast Philadelphia airport, which ended up seeing its record daily high of 74 on the 22nd.
It’s the single biggest kind of energy release we’ve ever done. And certainly as nuclear explosions go, Hiroshima was pretty much a pipsqueak. But it’s the first, and one of only two (so far), with real immediately quantifiable effects on human life and human infrastructure.
Humans are bad at big numbers. Saying something is almost 6 trillion miles away is eye-glazingly incomprehensible. Saying it’s one light year away seems so easy to understand. So for large quantities we need large units to keep the numbers small enough to communicate with the general public.
By trying to say the northeast is experiencing the same thing. We are not. Single day fluctuations in weather are not indicative by themselves of anything, that is normal March weather.
I’d agree if the geographical extent of the heat wave was the primary reason it was considered extreme. It is astonishing that an event centered in the southwest managed to set records clear to the Atlantic, but you could stop it at the Mississippi River, and I don’t think it’d matter much in the discussion of how extreme an event it is.
The nature of weather in the USA is that it moves from west to east. The fact something that started in the west moved east as it was only slowly losing its unique record-setting nature is utterly unsurprising.
Further, there is generally a dividing line between polar and non-polar air. At some times of year, generally winter and summer, that line is relatively parallel to the lines of latitude. At other times, generally spring & fall, the dividing line is very sinuous, plunging well down to the southern USA, then climbing back north to or beyond the US-Canada border.
The sinuosity is not a standing wave. The bends themselves slowly migrate from west to east. Which has the effect that a location anywhere in the middle 1/3rd of US latitudes will alternate every few days being on the pole side or the tropic side of the dividing line as the dividing line makes like a sidewinder snake sliding across the country.
Which means there’s nothing surprising about a particular location experiencing unusual heat followed by “crashing” back to the cool side of normal.
Now AGW will almost certainly increase the sinuosity and increase the contrasts on both sides.
It moving from west to east wouldn’t be. But encompassing both simultaneously while maintaining enough strength to set records is certainly surprising to me.
Again, I’m at 40°N and 5300 feet elevation. It has hit 90°F at my house. The previous record high for March 25 was 79°F. Temperature wise, this would be a typical day for July here.
It is hot out there. The dog has melted.
Anecdotally, here in southern Ontario temperatures have been more or less consistently seasonal throughout this whole spectacular heat wave. Right now in the early evening the temperature is 5°C (40°F) which is just a hair below normal for this time of year. Last year IIRC it started getting unseasonably warm sometime in April.
And what we’ve been experiencing here in the Midwest, over the last couple of weeks, is (a) having that boundary move north and south across us, and (b) the difference in temperature between the cool and warm air has been extreme. That’s what yielded the crazy thunderstorms and hail here two weeks ago, the massive blizzard up in Wisconsin a week-plus ago, and will yield some more strong thunderstorms with hail here tomorrow.