Ben’s Blog
After weeks of alternately cold and mild weather with more rain and ice than snow, winter put in quite an appearance this week. We had been tracking frigid air coming over the North Pole across Alaska and Canada for several weeks. It came here with a vengeance on the heels of a strong Alberta Clipper last Wednesday that deposited a fluffy 6 inches of snow, far more than the usual clipper event in Central Ohio. The reason was low water content in the very cold air that allowed about three-tenths of an inch of liquid equivalent turn into 6 inches of snow.
Normally, our snowfalls average closer to a 10:1 ratio (1 inch of snow from one-tenth of an inch of melted water). But this time we hit the jackpot in terms of snowfall, which further chilled the lower atmosphere by preventing much modification in the arctic surge that followed. Lows ranged from -11 in Columbus early Saturday to -28 in Morrow County near the Knox County line, the coldest readings we’ve seen locally in 15 years.
The calendar year of 2008 represented a downturn in our recent warm cycle, cooler than any year globally since 2000 (though still edging into the top ten warmest years). The relative absence of sunspots remains an intriguing possibility regarding our cooler phase and cold winter, though it may be too early to make that connection. I’ll write more as time goes on regarding a quiet solar period.
