The weather has certainly been extreme, not just in Israel, as you can see in the article below. These events are consistent with predicted changes in the frequency of extreme weather associated with greenhouse induced climate change.
Our weather shows that we will head out of the freezer and into the sauna, with a 15 C increase in temperature as the week progresses! We'll head up a bit in the next couple of days, down a bit less, and then start a quick journey to the top of the weather rollercoaster. Looking far ahead, we can't really say what will happen after we reach our peak temperatures. There are a few ensemble members that want to return us to winter, but we may just remain mild (with winter a distant memory).
Barry Lynn
Heat, Flood or Icy Cold, Extreme Weather Rages Worldwide
Menahem Kahana/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Snow blanketed Jerusalem on Thursday, an example of weather extremes that are growing more frequent and intense. More Photos »
By SARAH LYALL
Published: January 10, 2013 98 Comments
WORCESTER, England — Britons may remember 2012 as the year the weather
spun off its rails in a chaotic concoction of drought, deluge and
flooding, but the unpredictability of it all turns out to have been all
too predictable: Around the world, extreme has become the new
commonplace.
Multimedia
Viktor Everstov/Reuters
RUSSIA In Siberia, a man braved temperatures of 47 degrees below zero last month. More Photos »
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Especially lately. China is enduring its coldest winter in nearly 30 years. Brazil is in the grip of a dreadful heat spell.
Eastern Russia is so freezing — minus 50 degrees Fahrenheit, and
counting — that the traffic lights recently stopped working in the city
of Yakutsk.
Bush fires are raging across Australia, fueled by a record-shattering heat wave. Pakistan was inundated by unexpected flooding in September.
A vicious storm bringing rain, snow and floods just struck the Middle
East. And in the United States, scientists confirmed this week what
people could have figured out simply by going outside: last year was the hottest since records began.
“Each year we have extreme weather, but it’s unusual to have so many
extreme events around the world at once,” said Omar Baddour, chief of
the data management applications division at the World Meteorological
Organization, in Geneva. “The heat wave in Australia; the flooding in
the U.K., and most recently the flooding and extensive snowstorm in the
Middle East — it’s already a big year in terms of extreme weather
calamity.”
Such events are increasing in intensity as well as frequency, Mr.
Baddour said, a sign that climate change is not just about rising
temperatures, but also about intense, unpleasant, anomalous weather of
all kinds.
Here in Britain, people are used to thinking of rain as the wallpaper on
life’s computer screen — an omnipresent, almost comforting background
presence. But even the hardiest citizen was rattled by the near-biblical
fierceness of the rains that bucketed down, and the floods that
followed, three different times in 2012.
Rescuers plucked people by boat from their swamped homes in St. Asaph,
North Wales. Whole areas of the country were cut off when roads and
train tracks were inundated at Christmas. In Megavissey, Cornwall, a pub
owner closed his business for good after it flooded 11 times in two
months.
It was no anomaly: the floods of 2012 followed the floods of 2007 and
also the floods of 2009, which all told have resulted in nearly $6.5
billion in insurance payouts. The Met Office, Britain’s weather service,
declared 2012 the wettest year in England, and the second-wettest in
Britain as a whole, since records began more than 100 years ago. Four of
the five wettest years in the last century have come in the past decade
(the fifth was in 1954).
The biggest change, said Charles Powell, a spokesman for the Met Office,
is the frequency in Britain of “extreme weather events” — defined as
rainfall reaching the top 1 percent of the average amount for that time
of year. Fifty years ago, such episodes used to happen every 100 days;
now they happen every 70 days, he said.
The same thing is true in Australia, where bush fires are raging across
Tasmania and the current heat wave has come after two of the country’s
wettest years ever. On Tuesday, Sydney experienced its fifth-hottest day
since records began in 1910, with the temperature climbing to 108.1
degrees. The first eight days of 2013 were among the 20 hottest on
record.
Every decade since the 1950s has been hotter in Australia than the one
before, said Mark Stafford Smith, science director of the Climate
Adaptation Flagship at the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial
Research Organization.
To the north, the extremes have swung the other way, with a band of cold
settling across Russia and Northern Europe, bringing thick snow and
howling winds to Stockholm, Helsinki and Moscow. (Incongruously, there
were also severe snowstorms in Sicily and southern Italy for the first
time since World War II; in December, tornadoes and waterspouts struck the Italian coast.)
In Siberia, thousands of people were left without heat when natural gas
liquefied in its pipes and water mains burst. Officials canceled bus
transportation between cities for fear that roadside breakdowns could
lead to deaths from exposure, and motorists were advised not to venture
far afield except in columns of two or three cars. In Altai, to the
east, traffic officials warned drivers not to use poor-quality diesel,
saying that it could become viscous in the cold and clog fuel lines.
Meanwhile, China is enduring its worst winter in recent memory, with
frigid temperatures recorded in Harbin, in the northeast. In the western
region of Xinjiang, more than 1,000 houses collapsed under a relentless
onslaught of snow, while in Inner Mongolia, 180,000 livestock froze to
death. The cold has wreaked havoc with crops, sending the price of
vegetables soaring.
Way down in South America, energy analysts say that Brazil may face
electricity rationing for the first time since 2002, as a heat wave and a
lack of rain deplete the reservoirs for hydroelectric
plants. The summer has been punishingly hot. The temperature in Rio de
Janeiro climbed to 109.8 degrees on Dec. 26, the city’s highest
temperature since official records began in 1915.
At the same time, in the Middle East, Jordan is battling a storm packing torrential rain, snow, hail and floods that are cascading through tunnels, sweeping away cars and spreading misery in Syrian refugee camps. Amman has been virtually paralyzed, with cars abandoned, roads impassable and government offices closed.
Lukas Coch/European Pressphoto Agency
AUSTRALIA A bush fire, fueled by a
record-shattering heat wave, killed dozens of sheep at a farm near
Canberra in the Australian Capital Territory.
More Photos »
Multimedia
Israel and the Palestinian
territories are grappling with similar conditions, after a week of
intense rain and cold winds ushered in a snowstorm that dumped eight
inches in Jerusalem alone.
Amir Givati, head of the surface water department at the Israel
Hydrological Service, said the storm was truly unusual because of its
duration, its intensity and its breadth. Snow and hail fell not just in
the north, but as far south as the desert city of Dimona, best known for
its nuclear reactor.
In Beirut on Wednesday night, towering waves crashed against the
Corniche, the seaside promenade downtown, flinging water and foam dozens
of feet in the air as lightning flickered across the dark sea at
multiple points along the horizon. Many roads were flooded as hail
pounded the city.
Several people died, including a baby boy in a family of shepherds who
was swept out of his mother’s arms by floodwaters. The greatest concern
was for the 160,000 Syrian refugees who have fled to Lebanon, taking
shelter in schools, sheds and, where possible, with local families. Some
refugees are living in farm outbuildings, which are particularly
vulnerable to cold and rain.
Barry Lynn, who runs a forecasting business and is a lecturer at the
Hebrew University’s department of earth science, said a striking aspect
of the whole thing was the severe and prolonged cold in the upper
atmosphere, a big-picture shift that indicated the Atlantic Ocean was no
longer having the moderating effect on weather in the Middle East and
Europe that it has historically.
“The intensity of the cold is unusual,” Mr. Lynn said. “It seems the
weather is going to become more intense; there’s going to be more
extremes.”
In Britain, where changes to the positioning of the jet stream — a
ribbon of air high up in the atmosphere that helps steer weather systems
— may be contributing to the topsy-turvy weather, people are still
recovering from the December floods. In Worcester last week, the river
Severn remained flooded after three weeks, with playing fields buried
under water.
In the shop at the Worcester Cathedral, Julie Smith, 54, was struggling, she said, to adjust to the new uncertainty.
“For the past seven or eight years, there’s been a serious incident in a
different part of the country,” Mrs. Smith said. “We don’t expect
extremes. We don’t expect it to be like this.”
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