February heat is priming the US for crop-wrecking ‘whiplash’
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BY SAUL ELBEIN
February 27, 2024
Forget spring: This week, much of the interior U.S. is getting a sneak preview of summer.
A wave of unusual high temperatures — often 30 to 40 degrees above average — are blasting states from Texas to the Dakotas and east to the shores of the Great Lakes.
That heat follows the hottest December on record, and may push February into first place as well — a dynamic that is a harbinger of a hotter summer to come, and that is pushing several heartlands of American agriculture into a newly precarious state.
Much of America “had a two-week winter,” said Brad Rippey, a meteorologist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Across the country, trees are budding, and crops such as oats and winter wheat are sprouting above the soil two weeks early — putting them at risk if unseasonal heat yields to killing cold, as it did in the disastrous springs of 2007 and 2017.
Spring has arrived up to two weeks early this year compared to the 20 year average, according to the National Phenology Network, from five days early in Portland, Ore. to 13 days in Virginia Beach, Va.
That’s not to say the whole continent is warm, or even that the phenomenon of a late February warm front is unusual.
It’s normal for cold temperatures in the northwest this time of year to draw a mass of hot air up through the center of the country, said Joe Wegman, a meteorologist at National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) Weather Prediction Center.
And cold temperatures across Canada, Alaska and the Pacific Northwest are “terribly widespread,” said Judah Cohen, who runs the seasonal forecasting practice at Verisk AER, which does does predictions for federal agencies such as NOAA and NASA.
There’s also the fact that the Pacific Ocean is in its El Niño pattern — driving warm Pacific air across the interior U.S., as opposed to the frigid Arctic air that dominates during the La Niña, Scott Handel and Anthony Artusa of NOAA’s long-term Climate Prediction Center told The HIll.
But as planetary heating stacks on top of natural fluctuations in weather, “the warm parts aren’t just a little above normal,” Cohen said. “They can easily reach record warmth, because there’s just so much warmth in the system.”
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