Forgotten Winter: Science behind the record-breaking weather
NEGAUNEE TOWNSHIP, Mich. (WJMN) — One big meteorological factor stood above all others to make the winter of 2023-2024 a massively record-breaking season. Here’s why, what it is, and what it could mean for the rest of the year.
“We’ve just gone through a winter where it was kind of the ‘winter that wasn’t’,” said Matt Zika, a Meteorologist at the National Weather Service.
“Basically, every temperature record that could be broken throughout the winter with regards to the whole entire winter’s length—month by month—records for December, January and February were broken all across,” said Zika. “Not just here in Upper Michigan, but a large part of the Upper Great Lakes into parts of the Northern Plains area.”
Michigan’s Upper Peninsula is known for its harsh, unrelenting, long winters, so it came as a surprise to some when this one erred on the mild side.
Although anomalously warm winters happen occasionally, this winter was forecasted to be warmer than average due to the El Niño.
“The biggest thing that resulted in this record breaking warm winter was the strong El Niño that was occurring… where the water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific were well above normal,” explained Zika. “There’s this ocean atmospheric circulation that sets up, that results in this flood of Pacific air across the northern tier of the US, which resulted in our crazy warm winter that we experienced.”
To better understand El Niño, we need to look at the Pacific Ocean. In a normal year, trade winds will typically push warmer surface waters away from the Americas. However, during El Niño, the trade winds are weaker causing warmer surface waters to be pushed towards the Americas.
This creates a weather pattern in winter where the northwestern United States will experience warmer than average temperatures, parts of the Midwest and southeast will experience dryer conditions, and the southern parts of the United States will experience wetter conditions.
You may be wondering what that has to do with the Upper Peninsula. Well, if we take a look at the climatology of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, stronger El Niño years typically coincide with warmer winters.
But what does this mean for summertime? A common misconception is that since the winter was so mild, that means the summer will take forever to get here.
“The only merit there is if we look back over the last 20 plus years of data,” said Zika. “There’s definitely some hints of climate shifts occurring here in the U.P., where summers hang on longer into the fall. So Septembers and Octobers, a large majority of them over the last 20 years, the temperatures have been above normal.”
“On the flip side,” said Zika, “while not as direct of a correlation as the summer or fall, there’s definitely trends showing that our winters are hanging on longer in to the spring. So a significant number of our Aprils and Mays over the last 20 years, our temperatures have been below normal. Thus, when we reach this point in the season and we’re ready to move on, Mother Nature has been throwing us the curveballs here for many years over the last 20.”
Climate shifts? Does that mean this mild winter is going to be the new normal in the U.P.?
“Just because we went through this anomalous record breaking warm winter doesn’t mean that this is the new normal,” said Zika. “Just like referring back to the winter we had in 2013 and 2014, which was the coldest one we’ve seen on record. And we had questions there and it’s like, is this the new normal? That’s not the case. It’s not that unusual to get big swings in temperatures from year to year and correlating this winter to say now, next winter is going to be the same. We definitely can’t draw that conclusion at this time.”
Although this winter has been the “winter that wasn’t,” that doesn’t mean we won’t see any more snowy and cold winters, because of course—this is the U.P.!
Read the rest of the stories from our Forgotten Winter special report:
WATCH: The Forgotten Winter Full Episode
Forgotten Winter: Wildlife’s winners and losers of the season
Forgotten Winter: How local biz owners survived the warm winter
Forgotten Winter: Tourism experts on future of travel as winters wane
Forgotten Winter: What questions farmers have about its effect on next season
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