What is it about the weather?

“The coldest winter in years”, says meteorologist

I spend a lot of my time trying to work out why I keep hearing about how cold it is when both my experience,memory and my research tells me that the weather is nothing like what I have experienced in the past.

Just a few days ago I wrote the following after waking sweating in the middle of the night:

Warmer-than-usual weather in NZ as we head towards an el-Nino

And now I find that I am being told that we are in for a ‘colder-than usual’ winter.

Really?!

There may be more snow on the Alps than in the most recent, el-Nino winters but odds are that it will melt again when the temperatures go up again.

And here is the short-term forecast.

If we look at the sea temperature anomalies around NZ we can see that temperatures are still warmer than ‘average’ although,true this heat may be gradually moving away from New Zealand.

Climatologists bet on El Nino, warm months ahead

Federal forecasters see an El Nino moving in and bringing warmer and drier weather

As I have pointed out we have trouble headed our way in the form of another el-Nino although I have not heard that acknowledged from any New Zealand sources.

Last week I reported at the strangeness of temperatures RISING to 12 degrees Celsius in the middle of the night. The minimum temperature recorded on my thermometer last night was 12.2 degrees Celsius. It is currently 17.1C in the middle of the afternoon.

Well, I live in the city that has the reputation of having the worst weather in the country and yet we have this warm weather.

So I thought I’d better look somewhere else – to the city of my birth, Christchurch.

And I remember all those frosty days when there would be ice on the roads, not once a month but most days a week. Pretty stable really. The bad weather that blew through (and the fronts could come up in minutes) were the exception rather than the rules.

My memory is of plenty of days with blue skies and frosty mornings. Not only that but it was how it was when my father was brought up in the 1920’a.

Just in case my experiences of Christchurch in winter are subjective and unrepresentative then this comment certainly caught my attention:

“Probably not the worst but Christchurch is getting on a par with Wellington as the most depressing. since the earthquakes, sunny days are becoming a thing of the past. Usually around 8 days out of 10 , the east side is covered in low grey cloud for 80% of the day. The Metsevice says fine , but you go outside and nothing but grey sky for as far as the eye can see.”

And for what it is worth here is a description from northern Canada:

“You're describing what is happening here in northern Canada. Summer is in a month and only had maybe 5 days of sun. Otherwise it's that grey sky. Same was in winter.. it was hard.. September to May.”

Here is the weather for Christchurch today in this “colder-than-average” winter:

And here are the averages:

It’s not that I mistrust the ability of Metservice to predict tomorrow’s (or next week’s weather) as some might. I am not saying they've got it wrong and there is not going to be some pretty cold weather. 

What I do observe is that NIWA, Metservice, or whoever, misrepresent things to portray conditions of climate disruption as somehow ‘normal’ and I will continue to regard my own observations and the anecdotes of others as being a better reflection than the official explanations.

 Listen carefully to the description and what you have is a description of weather chaos. The young woman in the video is of such an age that she can hardly have any concept of what a 'stable climate' looks like and I doubt that her fellow researchers do either.

Our commenter above with his/her anecdotal evidence says the forecasters describe depressing, leaden skies as ‘fine weather’.

I rest my case:

P.S. Here is a photo of the unusual sky we observed here in Lower Hutt. "Normal", I'm sure, just like warm temperatures in the middle of the night and seesaw weather