Re: The Official Burton Thread
Posted: Tue May 21, 2024 2:54 pm
Perhaps other regions aren't seeing it in terms of snowfall, but in the midwest it's a pretty clear trend. Over the last 50 years the growing season has extended as frost patterns have shifted and the planting or growing zones have moved as it's warmer for longer further north. Winter starts later, ends earlier, temps are warmer and our snowfall is down. Though, if you look at precipitation (instead of actual snowfall) the totals look similar to historic averages, but now that precip is now coming as rain or mixed instead of as snow. It's measured and documented.AyAyRon wrote: ↑Tue May 21, 2024 11:16 am Im sure this is in direct response to the shitty winter experienced by many regions this year. I'm not sure there is a definite trend of shitty winters or not, after a three decades of living in the mountains i can't see any linear trend. There was a series of shitty winters in the 90's, 2000s, 2010's. People have short memories.
As a kid I can recall blizzards so bad people would get lost and die walking just a few yards to their cars. We could ride our snowmobiles from county to county all winter long. Farmers would put up miles of snow fences. We'd get "Alberta Clippers" coming though the region on a regular basis that would bring subzero temps for weeks at a time.
None of that happens anymore. Many of our snowmobile trails don't even open. Guys trailer their sleds further and further north just to ride.
I can recall 30 years ago when I was in high school they would plow snow into 20+ feet high piles in the school parking lot and then they'd come with big loaders and put it into dump trucks to take it away to make room for more snow. They'd dump it into fields like a garbage dump of snow mounds, and they'd put huge piles at the local sledding park and we'd make jumps out of it. Ski hills would normally be open by mid November, sometimes even late October, with natural snow.
Now there are no massive snow piles in parking lots, no loaders regularly taking it away, and these days our ski hills need to make artificial snow just to open at all. This isn't like a bad year or two. We haven't had what I would even consider a 'good' winter for over a decade.
Another anecdotal is there's a little bay in Copper Harbor which is at the very tip of the Keweenaw peninsula in Upper Michigan. The Keweenaw sticks out like a finger into the center of Lake Superior, the deepest and coldest of the great lakes. A lake with water so cold that it's usually only a little above freezing, and even in the dead heat of summer the shore water temps might get up to between 50 and 60 degrees. It's pretty uncomfortable even at it's warmest. So this little bay is maybe 2 miles long and 1/2 wide, and pretty small, sitting out into the middle of this cold cold lake, and it hasn't frozen over solid in several years. I mean, to me this is like, almost unfathomable.
There's more too. I could go on. And I don't know if it's normal climate shifts or not. I'm looking at a few decades, not hundreds or thousands of years. But it doesn't matter. But both the data and the experience is saying the same thing... shit's different.
