The New Normal

My favorite expression about the weather here in southwestern Connecticut is  “ we have nine months of ice and three months of thunderstorms”. If you were in the area last Thursday around 4pm you would have seen a spectacular example of a squall line preceding the cold front that descended through the state. The temperature at 6am was 74 degrees. It reached 89 degrees by 2pm and stayed warm and humid with reduced visibility in mist until the storms hit. The temperature at 7pm had fallen to 65 after the frontal passage.  I was over at Reliant Air covering the Mooney around 3pm when I snapped the shot attached to this email. The sky looked sick with a grey/green hue the heat and humidity were oppressive. When the winds started picking up a look at the nexrad showed what was beyond the low visibility, a massive line of storms. I was done for the day and started heading home. It took me close to an hour to complete a twelve mile drive.  When I turned onto my street which was littered with downed tree limbs and power lines it was the hail that surprised me.

Hail is in uncommon event here in the northeast. And to hear it smashing against the windows of my car as it mixed with the heavy rain it reduced the visibility to near zero. Following a neighbor’s taillights up the street and weaving to avoid the downed tree limbs and debris I started wondering if I was going to make it home or have to walk. That was an odd feeling, one I usually get when the snow is heavy on Pine Hill during the winter. Like this past winter, where we had record snowfalls and snow cover from early December on till the beginning of April

Anyway we’re living in our three months of thunderstorm season and looking at this past one plus the storm that spawned the tornados in Springfield a week or so ago it looks like this one may be a doozy. As a pilot and a flight instructor, who depends on flyable weather to make a living, I’ve been wondering what is going on with our weather.  I saw the following in a Reuter’s feed in May

"It's a new normal and I really do think that global weirding is the best way to describe what we're seeing," climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe of Texas Tech University told reporters.

"We are used to certain conditions and there's a lot going on these days that is not what we're used to, that is outside our current frame of reference," Hayhoe said on a conference call with other experts, organized by the non-profit Union of Concerned Scientists.

Hayhoe, other scientists, civic planners and a manager at the giant Swiss Re reinsurance firm all cited human-caused climate change as a factor pushing this shift toward more extreme weather.

While none would blame climate change for any specific weather event, Hayhoe said a background of climate change had an impact on every rainstorm, heat wave or cold snap.

"What we're seeing is the new normal is constantly evolving," said Nikhil da Victoria Lobo of Swiss Re's Global Partnerships team. "Globally what we're seeing is more volatility ... there's certainly a lot more integrated risk exposure."

The involvement of a reinsurance executive in a climatology conference adds extra credibility to a subject that a lot of us don’t want to admit is happening.  Bottom line our weather is changing and as pilots we have to deal with that.