Results tagged “elni”

It is hard for Gothamist to imagine a nicer weather day than today. Mostly sunny skies, a slight breeze and a high around 74. With winds out of the south coastal areas will be a few degrees cooler. A big high pressure system is dominating the weather scene over the eastern half of the country. There will be fewer clouds tomorrow and the high will reach into the low-80s. Warmer still on Friday. Friday's high will be close to 90 degrees, making it the warmest day since last August 3rd. The atmosphere may let off a bit of steam with a shower or thunderstorm Friday afternoon.

What's a polar bear to do when it is 72 in January? Well, if you're a member of the Coney Island Polar Bear Club, you stage a silent protest. The Times reports eight members of the club cancelled their Saturday swim, because the water was too warm. Perhaps more interestingly, the News reports it was nine members of the club and the Post says ten! According to Polar Bear Club treasurer Tom McGann, yesterday was the first time in more than a century that the club has cancelled a swim. Meanwhile, the News also reports that the real polar bears in the Central Park Zoo were largely unaffected by the warm weather.

When there's an El Niño, and there's a mild one right now, the atmosphere is more likely to circulate in a zonal, or west-to-east, pattern. A zonal circulation keeps the cold air to the north and the warm air to the south. Kind of like a McDLT! New York is far enough south that we mostly stay on the warm side of things. We're in a strongly zonal air flow pattern right now, and we look to stay that way for the next week.

Warm weather continues for the ninth straight day today as air gets pumped up from the south ahead of an approaching storm. It's quite a storm, too! Currently centered over Memphis, the storm is likely to kick off high winds, severe thunderstorms and tornadoes over much of the southeast later today. Say "hi" to a mild El Niño, as fall-winter severe storms along the Gulf Coast are more common when El Niño is around.

Important things first: Shea Stadium will see a bit of rain and wind this evening. Not ideal weather for baseball, but they should be able to get the game in. Yankee Stadium will also see a bit of wind and rain, but it doesn't really matter.

Nice late summer day, don't you think? Enjoy the warm, sunny goodness while you can because tomorrow is going to be decidedly less sunny, and a bit cooler. A cold front that currently stretches from Lake Superior, down to the Gulf Coast, and west to Arizona, is going to sweep through town tomorrow night. Ahead of that front we can expect showers and perhaps a thunderstorm, starting around daybreak tomorrow. The front is moving fast and the showers should be gone by the time we wake up on Wednesday. Once the front passes by, the sun will return but the warmth will not. Highs on Wednesday and Thursday will struggle to make 70. The first weekend of fall looks to be slightly warmer.

Really, we shouldn't be talking about heat in January but we're in the midst of another stretch of unusually warm weather. Temperatures were 15 degrees above normal over the weekend and at least that much again today (It's already 60 degrees at JFK!). If Gothamist has done our math correctly we will easily be the fourth warmest January on record and may squeeze by 1950 and 1990 to finish in second place. At two degrees warmer than any other January, 1932 will hold on to the top spot in the rankings. Rain moves in tonight and tomorrow looks soggy. It will be a little cooler but still well above average for the rest of the week. Can winter continue this warm? Only Staten Island Chuck knows for sure.

Today marks the official start of fall or autumn (how did we get those two names we wonder?). It seems to us that as people have become more and more interested in "wellness" and healthy mind and body crap, they are now calling it the equinox. What ever happened to just the first day of fall? That conjures up memorable images of pumpkins, class trips to the apple orchard, and falling amber leaves more than "equinox". But the equinox has that implication of equality. In Latin, aequus, equal + nox, night. So today we have equal time of night and day, 12 hours of each right? Wrong. It looks like we have 12h 09m of daylight today.

KP's post reminded me that there is another related, but lesser-known, ocean phenomenon known as La Niña:

Yes, welcome back little boy, Christ child... NOAA has announced the return of the warm waters to the Eastern Pacific, though noting that this time, it's not as strong. "Weaker" is the decription that they use actually. The last El Niño, was in 1997-1998 when it seemed that everything and anything weatherwise was being blamed on the friggen thing. Rain? El Niño. Cold? El Niño. Warm? El Niño. Headache? El Niño.