Next Few Days = Good, Next Few Years = Not so Good?

Oh, man, Gothamist's head is spinning this afternoon. We just read the New York article about near future weather and climate changes the city is facing. We cringe whenever we see the words "freakish" and "weird" in any story about the weather as their use usually means the author doesn't have a firm grasp of the subject matter. This case is no exception as we found numerous little errors and misinterpretations. Despite these errors the article mostly gets the big picture right: There's a mild El Nino (which usually indicates a mild winter), the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation is in its warm phase (greater hurricane frequency), and longer-term global temperatures are continuing to rise (more intense hurricanes).

If you are interested in how temperatures have changed over the past five years you're in luck. Gothamist had a bit of down time last week, so we did a little cutting-and-pasting of data to extend our daily temperature trend chart back to 2002. These are cumulative changes, where we keep adding how far above/below normal each day's temperature is to the previous day's total. If the climate weren't changing you'd expect to see ups and downs centered around zero. That's not been the case around here. 2002 got off to a warm start, then we went into a cool spell through July 2003. That was followed by two years of mostly near-normal temperatures. Starting in June 2005 its been almost all warm all the time. Over the past five years our average temperature has been 0.6 degrees above normal, but since June of last year temperatures have averaged nearly 2 degrees above normal.

But let's get back to this week. The last few days of chill begin to leave us tomorrow. High temperatures should be in the 50s for the rest of the week. There's a slight chance of rain Thanksgiving Day and a greater chance Thursday night into Friday. Overall though, this week's weather looks fairly uneventful and shouldn't cause much delay if you are traveling into, or out of, town.