Year 2014 Climate Summary and discussion (snow, warmest, ice, recorded)
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There are a thread for polls about 2014, but no thread for summary.
Also there a thread for summary of December, but not for the whole year.
So, this thread is for summary and talk about the weather we experienced in 2014.
As I am still waiting for the summary for my country, I will post a summary of the weather of three cities in Norway.
First, Stavanger, which together with a rural station further NE for the first time recorded a mean annual of 10C in Norway. The old record was 9.4C! A huge "improvement"!
Many stations beat the old record. Bergen recorded mean annual 9.9C
Stavanger Airport Sola was one of the stations that did not record a 30C+ temperature in the summer of 2014 - warmest high was 29.5C in July. Coldest low was -6.3C in December.
Mean cloudiness ranged from January 5.9 to 2.4 in May and June. Stavanger has about the same mean temperatures as Bergen, but half the precipitation, and more sunhours - the mean in Stavanger is 1513 hours.
Oslo:
The first two months in Oslo was extremely cloudy - much more cloudy than average. In Trondheim, January was very dry with a lot of clear weather - Trondheim and Oslo are separated by a mountain range (Dovrefjell), so with persistent weather setup, the weather can be completely opposites. October was the wettest ever.
Oslo - Blindern had it's warmest July ever. But earlier weather stations has been warmer - July 1901 had a mean of 22.7C. Blindern was not the warmest station in Oslo, as Bygdøy had a July mean of 21.1C and avg high of 27.2. As with Stavanger, this was the warmest year ever in Oslo.
Sunhours: Lacking data for September, October and December - so I used the mean for Oslo and adjusted a little looking at the mean cloudiness. The total year will be pretty close to the real hours.
As with Trondheim, Oslo has a large city forest (Nordmarka) right next to the city. There are snow depth recording at Bjørnholt (360 m):
January: Avg snow depth 24 cm, max 69
February: Avg 70 cm, max 90 cm
March: Avg 56 cm, max 82 cm
April: Avg 13 cm, max 36
October: Avg 0, max 6 cm
November: Avg 0, max 0
December: Avg 3 cm, max 8 cm.
Less snow at Blindern, snowiest month was January with mean snow depth 10 cm and max 31 cm, and February managed mean 7 cm and max 26 cm.
Trondheim:
Notice the very different precipitation pattern compared with Oslo. Too bad there are no sunhour - recording in Trondheim. July must have been close to the national record (430 hr recorded in July 1980 in Tromsø). As the winter was so dry, there were less snow than usual. But in December, we had a avg snow depth of 5 cm and max depth of 25 cm.
I notice the precipitation map has no higher value than 650 mm. In Norway we would need at least 2,500 mm for the wettest areas....
Well, no need, as that's impossible. The precipitation scale differs from year to year, in 2008 it went up to 1000mm.
Ok, I will post the Turku stats tomorrow when I get the sunshine, but here's two locations:
I took the centre station and not the airport one, even if the airport is better for the region as a whole, but for novelty purposes when that station now appeared on ogimet and meteociel.
When Norway and Sweden basked in record high October temperatures, only the West coast of Finland including Turku managed to get above average, in Centre it was slightly below, on the airport average. And in July, Kaisaniemi recorded the same 29.6C temp three times, which shows how difficult it sometimes is. Of course the station is much more maritime than the airport.
The other one I chose was Lappeenranta, in SE Finland. I mentioned it during the summer, but for ONCE Turku was warmer than Lappeenranta during a warm summer. We lost both 2010 and 2011, severely... Surprisingly cold in January, and here too a miserable June. October below average too. The record lows are odd, LPR beat Turku in April, May, August, September and December record lows. Not maybe surprising though considering that lake Saimaa peaked at 27C SST's.
That precipitation pattern is very weird, LPR got some weird May monsoon, normal rainfall is 38mm...
Corvallis, OR (USA):
January started the year out continuing the same dry pattern that pervaded all last year. We got anywhere from 20 to 40 percent average rainfall for the month. It was seasonably cool.
February was a cooler and much wetter than average month. Starting the 6th, the Willamette Valley was hammered by the worst snowstorm since 1937 and the second worst ever. We measured 17.5 inches on our back patio and some locations immediately west of town logged two feet. Even in Buffalo or Duluth that would have been impressive.
March through May were wet but warmer than average and we were able to get stuff in the ground earlier than at any time in the last 15 years. Our garden got off to a great start.
June was dreary but no cooler than average and almost exactly average in rainfall. A plain vanilla month.
July started a string of four consecutive month of near record warmth. I have never seen such an extended streak of much warmer than average days without at least one afternoon setting a daily record. It didn't happen once but we logged the second warmest July and August, the fourth warmest September and the warmest October of all time before settling into a November much more typical of late fall.
A gully washer of a rainstorm, mixed with ice at times on the 14th and bringing us nearly 2 inches (50mm) of ice water precipitation, didn't keep us from logging the second of only two months of significantly below average precipitation in 2014. Our drought, at least, is pretty much gone but as wet as northern California has been since November they are still dealing with it.
And finally December. We got hit with a cold snap that is still ongoing but in spite of that, we had the warmest once since 1950 and fourth warmest ever.
2014 will go down as one of the top five warmest years on record since 1889. This, in spite of ENSO conditions still favoring cooler temperatures and a weakening negative PDO cycle doing the same thing.
*Warm year overall
*Rainfall very erratic, as usual
*August was a wetter month than normal (that month is usually the driest)
*April extremely wet with over 21 rain days - ouch
*Another year where November records a higher temperature than December
*Extremely dry January and June, which are wet months on average
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