Steve Burns

WMAL.com

WASHINGTON – (WMAL) If you’ve recently thought to yourself, “winter doesn’t quite feel the same anymore,” you wouldn’t be alone. It’s been a gradual shift, but climate scientists say this winter is a perfect example of the new winter norm thanks to rising temperatures.

“What that has done has actually created a trend snow-wise, where we’re seeing less snow on average annually, but we’re seeing bigger snow events,” Global Climate Program Research Analyst Forbes Tompkins told WMAL. “Warming temperatures allow us to hold more moisture, so it’s providing more fuel for these storms when they do occur.”

There are fewer of those coating-to-an-inch type storms, he said, and quite a few more severe events.

“Storms that are dropping a foot or more of snow are actually happening every five or six years, which is roughly nine times more often than they were before 1980,” Tompkins said. “The blizzard that we saw last month, and the event that we saw on Monday, are more of these extreme scenarios that are becoming more frequent than they were in the past.”

The good news, he said, is warming temperatures also leave us with a generally shorter snow season overall. But warmer temperatures and instability in the Arctic can lead to bigger temperature swings, like the near-zero readings of last weekend.

“It can cause what has typically been Arctic air trapped in the Arctic, the jet stream that holds it in place can become more wavy rather than driving around in a racetrack.”