from Hacker News

Hottest May in History for Texas

by rdubs333 on 5/29/22, 10:15 PM with 65 comments

  • by cpncrunch on 5/29/22, 11:41 PM

    We just had the coldest May in 77 years in coastal BC. Both are due to the current La Nina conditions.

  • by moistly on 5/30/22, 12:17 AM

    I guess the snarkers will always regale us with their snide dismissal, but as someone who has lived in one place for going on a half-century, I witness the change: winters had feet of snow and now have inches. Temperatures drops are harder, temperature highs have gone from 40C to nearly 50, which is insane. Rainfall patterns have changed markedly, and they’re interfacing with snowmelt and now flood events happen like never before. Because of that, forest fires, too, have gone nuts, because the summers now dry out to an extreme.

    In this area we have indigenous families that have histories that go back for many hundreds and even thousands of years. I live in an area that had been idyllic for as long as any family can remember, a claim backed by geo/biological evidence. There is no record of the area climate behaving like this. The change has been abrupt and extreme and, frankly, dangerous.

  • by Lich on 5/30/22, 12:10 AM

    Wettest May in 40+ years in Western Washington.

  • by the_third_wave on 5/30/22, 8:38 AM

    Here's an interesting graph showing the average insolation for several places in Sweden over the last 40-something years:

    https://www.smhi.se/polopoly_fs/1.181504.1647960904!/image/a...

    Notice the steady increase (called "global brightening"). This graph is produced and hosted by the Swedish Meteorological & Hydrological Institute (SMHI). They don't produce similar graphs for longer periods nor do they show the correspondence between average insolation and temperature. Fortunately the data is available for Stockholm (see e.g. page 184 of IPCC's AR5 - Observations: Atmosphere and Surface, [1]) which made it possible to create such a graph:

    https://imgur.com/a/JF5JlxH

    The correspondence between insolation and average temperature is very strong but it hardly ever gets mentioned in the public discourse around climate change. It is discussed on page 186 of AR5 chapter 2 [1] where the observation is made that there is a correspondence and there are numerous studies which come to the same conclusion but as so often is the case there is little to no relation between what the scientific literature says and how the media presents this.

    [1] https://archive.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar5/wg1/WG1AR5...

  • by mistrial9 on 5/30/22, 12:18 AM

    Science blog on related topics https://weatherwest.com/

  • by aaronbrethorst on 5/30/22, 1:23 AM

    Cmd+F

    "Climate"

    "Not Found"

  • by refurb on 5/30/22, 12:14 AM

    Wait this article is from May 12th. It’s not “the hottest May on record”, because May isn’t even over?

    What the article says is the average high/low of the first 11 days is hotter than the hottest month.

    Uhhh… statistics don’t work like that?

    You cant compare a part month to a full month and make that claim because your selectively comparing some days to an average of a whole month.

  • by swayvil on 5/30/22, 2:13 AM

    Southern IL. Coldest spring ever. The roses are doing wonderfully.

    Much extreme seesawing of temperature too.

  • by formerkrogemp on 5/30/22, 12:03 AM

    It's getting worse, every, single year. The climate is a changin'.

  • by chrisgnarly on 5/29/22, 11:41 PM

    So far

  • by xet7 on 5/30/22, 12:31 AM

    Seems to be 403 forbidden. Text from that article, from archive.org:

    > Our hottest May in history gets much worse next week

    > What we have seen so far in the month of May is nothing short of extraordinary. When you take the average temperature (morning lows & afternoon highs) in Austin through the first 11 days of the month, you get 82.2 degrees. That is 1.6 degrees higher than the next hottest May on the list, 2018. I know that doesn't sound like much, but that is a significant margin when looking at multi-day averages. Unfortunately, our lead will only increase with the third week of May likely to shatter numerous records across the state of Texas.

    > May 2022 is our hottest May in history through the first 11 days.

    > First, WHY have we been so hot so early in the year? It has been the perfect storm of ingredients including a La Nina phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, our worst drought in seven years, and finally a very early showing of a ridge of high pressure that has been stubborn over the southern U.S. High pressure consists of sinking air in the lower and middle levels of the atmosphere, and physics dictates that when air sinks, it compresses, and compressed air is hotter.

    > Now, onto the forecast for the next 7 to 10 days in Texas. The ridge of high pressure is in the process of reorganizing and intensifying over Mexico, and it will return to Texas as early as this weekend. It won't be in a hurry to leave either with this sinking air situated over the state through all of next week.

    > In Austin, that gets us to the upper 90s as early as Saturday and near/above 100 by Sunday and Monday. Hitting 100 this early in the year is highly unusual with this marking our third earliest trip to triple digits in Austin's recorded history. We could push even higher though through the second half of next week.

  • by tamaharbor on 5/30/22, 1:50 AM

    Everyone wherever I have lived thinks their weather is special. “If you don’t like the weather here one timeframe, just wait for the next”. Change is apparently the nature of weather.

  • by z9znz on 5/30/22, 12:03 AM

    And I just added to the carbon footprint burning electricity waiting for this. It did indeed take about two minutes to "process".

    [Edit - continuing after it finished resulted in a blank page. Refreshing the page resulted in "403 Forbidden". Clearly they just do not want you to disable the optional cookies. It is Sinclair after all, so I'm surprised I didn't have to provide voter registration info to get in.]

    " We are processing the requested change to your cookie preferences.

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