Freezing January for Easterners Was Not Felt Round the World

An abandoned farmhouse near Bakersfield, Calif., in February. California is struggling with a severe drought. David McNew/Getty Images

By JUSTIN GILLISFEB. 20, 2014

For people throughout the Eastern United States who spent January slipping, sliding 

and shivering, here is a counterintuitive fact: For the earth as a whole, it was the

fourth-warmest January on record.

It was, in fact, the 347th consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average, the government reported Thursday.

That may feel plausible to Californians, whose state experienced temperatures 10 or 15 degrees above normal in some places last month, and especially to Alaskans, where the average temperature was almost 15 degrees above normal.

But on a map of January temperatures released Thursday by government weather analysts, the Eastern United States stood out as one of the coldest areas on the planet, compared with seasonal norms.

That is no surprise to anybody living east of the Mississippi River, of course — certainly not to the Atlantans who were caught up in two memorable ice storms that shut down the city, or the New Yorkers who are still picking their way through mounds of dirty snow.

But this might be another surprise: Despite all the weather drama, it was not a January for the record books.

By the time analysts averaged the heat in the West and the cold in the East, the national temperature for the month fell only one-tenth of a degree below the 20th-century average for January. January 2011 was colder.

No state set a monthly record for January cold. Alabama, also walloped by the ice storms, came closest, with the fourth-coldest January on its record books.

The United States covers only 2 percent of the surface of the globe, so what happens in this country does not have much influence on overall global temperatures.

Brazil, much of southern Africa, most of Europe, large parts of China and most of Australia were unseasonably warm in January, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported Thursday. That continues a pattern of unusual global warming that is believed to be a consequence of human-caused emissions of greenhouse gases.

Even in the United States, more than a third of the country is in drought of varying intensity. Mountain snowpack in many parts of the West is only half of normal, portending a parched summer and a likelihood of severe wildfires.

“Today’s snowpack is tomorrow’s water in the West,” said Deke Arndt, chief of climate monitoring for the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., in a briefing on Thursday. “If it does not recover, this will have consequences for months down the road.”

The Arctic blasts of this winter do stand out in the weather records of this young century, even if they are pretty humdrum when compared with the 1970s and 1980s. Winters have been so mild over the past couple of decades — probably as a result of global warming, scientists say — that some young adults have never experienced cold waves quite so intense.

And the pain may not be over. Forecasters say the northern tier of the United States

may face still more cold blasts, storms and heavy winds right up to the doorstep of 

spring, albeit interspersed with bursts of warmth in some areas.

Over just the next few days, the Southeast may be hit by severe thunderstorms, high winds and even hail. The Midwest may have wind gusts up to 60 miles an hour. And the Northeast could see rain, snow or a mix of the two.

Temperatures across the eastern Great Plains, the Great Lakes and the Mississippi Valley are expected to be below normal for the next month and into the spring.

But the cold weather in the East is being balanced, in a sense, by the bizarrely warm temperatures in the West. And that trend, too, is likely to continue.

The outlook over the next month is for continued above-normal temperatures in the West, the Southwest and parts of Alaska, as well as a continuation of the California drought, despite recent rains that have eased the situation slightly.

The extremes in January were directly related, experts said, with the two regions falling on opposite sides of a big loop in the jet stream, a belt of high winds in the upper atmosphere that helps to regulate the climate.

A dip of the jet stream into the Eastern United States allowed cold air to descend from the Arctic, while a corresponding ridge in the West allowed warm air to hover over California and to penetrate normally frigid regions to the north.

For those ready for the warmth to dip in their direction, mark a calendar: March 20, at 12:57 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time.

That is when the tilt of the Earth causes the sun to pass over the Equator and re-enter the Northern Hemisphere, bringing spring with it.