Warm Winter=Hot Summer?

A lot to go over on this Tuesday morning here in KC. Good morning and thanks for stopping by the FOX 4 Weather blog. Just a reminder that you can follow us on Twitter @fox4wx to learn other little nuggets of weather information that go through my strange little mind sometimes. Love to see you follow us if you haven’t already.

How about this for a strange nugget…our average high temperature in DEC of 2011, a month with the average temperature overall was 4.4° above average was 45.6°. It should be no secret that as we move into JAN the average highs are supposed to drop off. as a matter of fact JAN is the coldest month in KC. Obviously this month that finishes today is not living up to that. For average highs this month (JAN 2012) at this point we’re sitting @ 46.2°. That’s some 8 degrees above average (for highs) and makes this month (for average highs) actually warmer than DEC 2011. In other words instead of getting colder compared to DEC, we got warmer! Just plain crazy. Certainly today’s highs in the 60s will help the cause even more. We may tack on another .5° to that just with today’s warm weather!

After doing my blog on Sunday wondering if there was a correlation between dry winters and dry summers (there isn’t)…one of our blog readers asked on Sunday night the question “if the winter is so warm then is the following summer really hot?”. So I went and looked at the 20 warmest winters and looked to see if any fell into the 20 hottest summers category.

Here are the 20 warmest winters going in reverse order.

20)  1908/09    34.6
19)  1922/23    34.6
18)  1975/76    34.7
17)  1938/39    34.7
16)  1932/33    34.8
15)  1907/08    35.0
14)  1965/66    35.2
13)  1999/00    36.0
12)  1918/19    36.0
11)  1933/34    36.0
10)  2005/06    36.1
 9)  2001/02    36.1
 8)  1997/98    36.2
 7)  1952/53    36.2
 6)  1953/54    36.9
 5) 1889/90 36.9
 4) 1991/92 37.2
 3) 1920/21 37.9
 2) 1930/31 38.5
 1) 1931/32 39.1

I highlighted the Top 5 for you.

Now let’s look at the Top 20 hottest summers this time in order from hottest to least hot with the Top 5 highlighted in RED

1)   1934      84.9
2)   1936      84.4
3)   1954     82.6 
4)     1901     81.9
5)    1953     81.2
6)    1913      80.9
7)    1918      80.8
8)    1952      80.5
9)    1937      80.3
10)   1980      80.2
11)   1956      80.0
12)   1963      79.9
13)   1957      79.8
14)   1938      79.8
15)   2010      79.7
16)   1943      79.6
17)   1988      79.6
18)   1933      79.6
19)   1947      79.5
20)   1935      79.5

If I did my comparisons right, I could only find 2 summers that were in the Top 20 for hottest summer after a warm winter. That would be the winter of 1933/34 followed by the summer of 1934 and the winter of 1932/33 followed by the summer of 1933. Interestingly they were back to back years. I did find 4 instances of the opposite, meaning that a hot summer was followed by a warm winter which is sort of interesting (that’s 20% of the time).

That’s a lot of number crunching so early in the AM!

I decided NOT to water the yard yesterday because it’s looking more and more likely that a decent storm is going to bring us some much needed moisture later this week. The storm now is off the coast of the PAC NW and looks pretty healthy. Today btw is the 43rd straight day without 1/2″ moisture I think.

The models have been all over the place with this lately but all seem to agree on a good moisture storm moving through the middle part of the country on FRI/SAT. The moisture from the gulf will certainly play a large role in giving us our best chance of seeing 1/2″ rainfall. One of the issues with this storm is that we should get a good initial shot of rainfall on Friday that moves pretty quick, then after that we may get dry-slotted as the storm gets so wrapped up that it brings in drier air in the mid-upper levels from the SW part of the country. So we may have to rely on that first surge of moisture for the bulk of the precipitation from the storm. Obviously a lot can and will change with this, but at least from several days out it looks promising. Heck the EURO model, which has not done so well lately, keeps this thing around through the early part of next week. The Canadian model actually generates a decent snow here on SAT. So there are many possibilities, although my initial feelings are that this will be a rain and not snow event here. IF there was any cold air to the north that could be dragged into this thing it would be a different animal. For us to get snowfall here we’d have to rely on the storm strengthening and cooling down the atmosphere on it’s own.

By the way we’re going to finish this month (a dry one to begin with on average) with .06″ of precipitation. In JAN of 2009 we had .05″ for the month and in 1986 we had .02″ for JAN. We then had decent+ precipitation for the rest of the year. In 2009 we finished with almost 45″ of precip and in 1986 we had 39.5″.

Enjoy these mild temperatures!

Joe