Cold Recap

I wrote this blog post back in September on the lack of sunspots and potential winter weather impacts. In it and another few posts I noticed there was an interesting correlation (but no causation proof) between the lack of sunspots and abnormally cold weather in the Northern Hemisphere.

How is the winter of 08/09 stacking up, anecdotally?

Vancouver experienced "snowmaggedon" which canceled all Air Canada short haul flights into and out of Vancouver for a couple days before Christmas and ended with Vancouver being the snowiest place in Canada right around the 25th. Vancouver's winter 08/09 snow removal budget was $750,000 and they spent $3 million in December alone.

Marseilles, France - the usually sunny Mediterranean Sea port city was crippled when 40 cm of snow fell on January 7th, closing the airport, trapping 2 - 3,000 people on roads and putting 10,000 people into the dark.

The Rutgers University snow lab shows the current levels of snow globally are the highest since 1967.

UK Premier League games were canceled on January 10th due to "frozen pitches" as temperatures, even in the south UK, reached -12 and parts of the River Thames froze.

German newspaper states that Hamburg is experiencing the coldest winter in 100 years.

Saskatoon experiences 24 consecutive days of -25 or colder weather, the first time since record keeping began in 1892.

And finally, the Dutch use an ice-breaker in Rotterdam for the first time since 1996.

And there are basically no new sunspots on the sun yet.