It’s a Historic Year for Temperature Extremes

In the US, we’re living in two countries: One scourged by heat and the other bitten by cold.


This story originally appeared in CityLab and is republished as part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

This year is shaping up to be one of the weirder ones in America’s weather history. That’s because we now seem to be living in two geographically separate nations: one scalded by unbearable heat, the other bitten by waves of unusual cold.

In a typical year, the US has either mostly warm or mostly cool temperature extremes (meaning values at the top or bottom of a historical range of temperatures). For instance, years in the late ’70s were marked by extreme cold throughout the country, while the 2000s featured increasingly frequent baths of abnormally hot weather, as pictured in this NOAA graph of January-to-July daytime highs:

But as seen at the graph’s far right, 2014 is ushering in a prominent and record-setting split between competing regions of hot and cool temperatures—the former in the drought-plagued West and Alaska, the latter in the Midwest and Missouri Valley. Climate.gov writes:

In most years in the record, extremes are significantly lopsided: A given year’s bar is mostly red or mostly blue, sometimes capped with a small segment of the opposite color. In other words, either some part of the country is experiencing warm extremes or cold extremes, but not both. Only a handful of years have a pattern similar to 2014—in which more than 10 percent of the country was experiencing extreme warmth while a similarly large or larger area experienced extreme coolness…

Even among these years, 2014 is unprecedented: Never before has the country experienced such large areas of simultaneous, opposing temperature extremes in the same January-July period. At a combined 40 percent of the country, the area affected by extremes so far this year is nearly double the size you’d expect due to chance.

If random weather patterns aren’t behind the great hot/cold split, what might be? The government folks behind this latest analysis promise to post possible answers soon, but one theory comes from international scientists who published a study this spring on the history of the jet stream. They believe that the stream is locked in a “positive” phase, meaning it’s hauling warmth up to the West and then blasting the East with polar chill. As the climate continues to warm, these stream-derived temperature differences could become entrenched, the scientists say, with the West experiencing more “mild, relatively warm winters” and the East increasingly winding up underneath a “freight car of arctic air.”

More Mother Jones reporting on Climate Desk

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We can’t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

The upshot: Being able to rally $253,000 in donations over these next few weeks is vitally important simply because it is the number that keeps us right on track, helping make sure we don't end up with a bigger gap than can be filled again, helping us avoid any significant (and knowable) cash-flow crunches for now. We used to be more nonchalant about coming up short this time of year, thinking we can make it by the time June rolls around. Not anymore.

Because the in-depth journalism on underreported beats and unique perspectives on the daily news you turn to Mother Jones for is only possible because readers fund us. Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism we exist to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

And we need readers to show up for us big time—again.

Getting just 10 percent of the people who care enough about our work to be reading this blurb to part with a few bucks would be utterly transformative for us, and that's very much what we need to keep charging hard in this financially uncertain, high-stakes year.

If you can right now, please support the journalism you get from Mother Jones with a donation at whatever amount works for you. And please do it now, before you move on to whatever you're about to do next and think maybe you'll get to it later, because every gift matters and we really need to see a strong response if we're going to raise the $253,000 we need in less than three weeks.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate