Mild Winter, Warm Spring, Hot Summer

What’s going on with the weather? Professor Rich Wildman from Quest University, sat down with us to help us understand. Here’s what we found out:

At the root of it all, it’s simple: mild winter with low levels of snow, leaves less to melt and everything dries up faster.

This explains why we are starting off with a very dry summer.But why has it been so warm?

For this question, we called in the experts. Professor Rich Wildman works at Quest University in the Physical Sciences department, and is an environmental chemist.

According to Professor Wildman this past winter was 2 degrees warmer than the long term average, which is why we saw so much rain and low levels of snow. Our past winter is what the average winter is forecast to look like in the year 2050. The reason it was so mild is because the West Coast was sitting in a wave of temperate air coming from Hawaii. Unlike our friends on the East Coast, who were sitting in a wave of Arctic air that kept the snow pouring in.

Professor Wildman says, however, “Climate change means more variability from one winter to the next. While we might have just had the winter that is supposed to be the average for the year 2050, there is a lot of variability around that average…This could reverse and we could have piles of snow next winter.”  He continued to say, “The waves (of temperate and arctic air) are supposed to come more often and stay in place longer.”

“One of the dominant ideas about climate change preparation is that the extremes are going to become more extreme. The idea is that when times are dry they can stay dry longer, and when times are hot they can be hot longer.”

If that wasn’t very helpful in explaining the ever-complicated subject of climate change, here’s another explanation with Bill Nye the Science Guy, using emojis: