#warm spell

Daily painting 14/365

“Hello again!”

The cruelest month

Eighty degrees, a flawless sky, dry as a soda cracker ... If you dropped from space into mid-Michigan, you’d think you were in San Diego.

As a headline in The Onion put it, “Midwest Battered By Beautiful Weather”.

Four consecutive days of this, after all that rain, has the chlorophyll factory on triple-shift, pumping out the flora. Buds are popping, grass is greening, the forsythia is on fire.

Warm Spell

Even the weather isn’t cooperating with Putin.

Ol’ Vladimir was hoping that reducing gas supplies to Europe during winter would force the EU and NATO members to bend to his will. And he was also counting on freezing Ukraine into submission by destroying their power grid.

Instead, Europe is experiencing a rather warm winter. This is likely a side effect of climate change – certainly partly due to Russia’s previous exports of fossil fuels. /irony

The warmest January day ever was recorded in at least eight European countries including Poland, Denmark, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, Belarus, Lithuania and Latvia, according to data collated by Maximiliano Herrera, a climatologist who tracks extreme temperatures.

In Korbielów, Poland, the mercury hit 19C (66F) – a temperature the Silesian village is more used to in May, and 18C above the 1C annual average for January. In Javorník in the Czech Republic it was 19.6C, compared with an average of 3C for this time of year.

Temperatures in Vysokaje, Belarus, would normally hover around zero at this time of year. On Sunday they reached 16.4C, beating the country’s previous record January high by 4.5C.

Elsewhere on the continent, local records were broken at thousands of individual measuring stations, with nearly 950 toppled in Germany alone from 31 December to 2 January, Herrera said.

Yep, if it’s sunny during the day you can occasionally go about your business in a t-shirt in parts of Poland and the Czech Republic. Not much need for Russian gas in such weather.

Alex Burkill, a senior meteorologist at the Met Office, agreed it was an extreme weather event. “It’s been extreme heat across a huge area, which is almost, to be honest, unheard of,” he said.

[ ... ]

“It has been widespread, Denmark, Czech Republic, as well as pretty much the whole of Germany have seen temperatures for January exceeding records,” Burkill said.

“It’s also worth noting, we had some exceptionally warm weather in the south of England. New Year’s Eve, I think about seven sites in southern England recorded their warmest ever New Year’s Eve on record.”

There had been talk of a heating crisis in the UK. That is now unlikely.

As for Ukraine itself, here is a weather map of Ukraine. It was captured Tuesday at 4:35 PM Ukraine time (1435 GMT). Temperatures are in degrees Celsius. Yes, those are plus signs next to the temperatures. +

It’s not quite t-shirt weather in Ukraine, but all the temperatures are above freezing. The coldest city is Poltava which reports 4.1°C/39.3°F. Kyiv reports 9.9°C/49.8° F. And in Mykolaiv it’s 12.9°C/55.2°F. The forecast calls for above freezing temperatures in Kyiv for the rest of this week.

While it is a bit disturbing that it’s this warm in January, it also means that less fossil fuel will be used for heating; and the war has caused many countries to look for permanent climate-friendly alternatives to Russian gas and oil.

“Ready for Spring”

unlikely January

teasing creation,

instilling hope in fauna

before unleashing fresh snow.

.

“Playing Along the Story Trail”