Weather perfection here, ‘uncharted’ Arctic warmth

Minnesota's weather has gone Greek this week. Leave it to meteorologists to name weather patterns after letters in the Greek alphabet. Think of it as the weather version of Sesame Street. This week's mild sunny weather is brought to you by the Greek letter "Omega." 

The ridge of high pressure over the Great Lakes acts like a 350-pound offensive lineman in football. Rain systems are pushed around the high to the south and west, meaning Minnesota and the Upper Midwest enjoys sunny, mild, dry weather this week.

The forecast details? Cue the Maytag repairman. If you're old enough to remember that shtick. The Twin Cities NWS lays out the sun symbols.

The longer range forecast for next week looks mild. In fact the upper air forecast suggest we could be easing into a more summer-like patter for the last two weeks of May. The jet stream may be ready to take a long Canadian vacation.

NOAA's Climate Prediction Center agrees a warm bubble of air will persist over the Midwest and Great Lakes.

NOAA's GFS model suggest a potentially thundery pattern by Memorial Day weekend. Rain on Memorial Day weekend in Minnesota? Shocking, I know.

Severe weather peak ahead

It's not your imagination. Of the "big 3" summer holidays, your Memorial Day picnic is most likely to be soggy with a chance of sirens. The peak period for severe weather warnings in the Twin Cites falls between Memorial Day and the 4th of July. Things tend to quiet down a bit in late summer. Labor Day weekend statistically is your best bet for a sunny, dry summer holiday weekend.

Arctic 2016 weather in uncharted territory

The incredible run of Arctic warmth this year is opening the eyes of climate watchers. Temperatures have been running 5 to more then 10 degrees warmer than average.

Arctic Sea ice continues to track at record lows, with ice cover well below the previous record low year of 2012.

Climate scientists are watching to see if this summer will break more records, and if Greenland will respond with another massive glacial freshwater discharge into the North Atlantic.

Chris Mooney from the Washington Post has this insightful look at why the Arctic is trending into uncharted territory in 2016. I pulled two select clips that caught my eye.

January and February, in particular, set a new record for overall warmth in the Arctic, according to NOAA. Sure enough, when it comes to the U.S. Arctic in particular, Alaska has been warmer than ever recorded so far this year. NASA’s latest data show that this April was also record warm for the globe as a whole, but with some respite for some parts of the Arctic (though not others, including Alaska and Greenland).

And with temperatures already this warm, experts say we could see even more dramatic changes when summer arrives and we move fully into wildfire season, as well as the melt season for sea ice and the vast ice sheet of Greenland. Let’s look at some of these possible changes in sequence:

Sea ice. Arctic sea ice set a record in March for the lowest winter peak ever recorded. That means that during the time of year when there is seasonally the most ice covering the Arctic ocean, there was the least yet observed. More recently, Mashable’s Andrew Freedman highlighted fractures in the Arctic ocean ice cap between Greenland and the North Pole, which a leading sea ice expert, Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center, called “very unusual.”

Greenland. Take the enormous sheet of Arctic ice that, if we’re unlucky, will contribute to momentous sea level rise in coming decades and centuries. Greenland’s record melt yearwas also 2012, when the ice sheet is believed to have given up 562 billion tons of ice to the ocean, leading to well over a millimeter of global sea level rise in a single year.

Once again, we can’t be sure that 2016 will be like 2012 — much less that it will surpass it. Still, Greenland has already seen a startling early surface melt event — in April — which could set the stage for a great deal more as summer rolls around. “Every time you have these events, they do make changes to the properties of the snowpack that are all going in the same direction, which is basically accelerating the melting,” says Marco Tedesco, a Greenland expert based at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University.

From the twitterverse

So you wanna be a weather observer  at 6k feet on Mt. Washington in New Hampshire? You can't make this up.

California drought persists.

Meanwhile under the east side of our sunny omega block