Deciphering This Strange Recent Weather

The sporadic levels of the temperatures and precipitation we’ve experienced recently has a lot to do with what’s known as the jet stream flow, a steering mechanism for almost all major weather systems. This jet stream has kept the cold air out of the northeast Michigan area, and that’s one reason why it’s been warmer than normal at times.

“Many times, those air masses, they may have originated in the arctic, and they’ve spent time over the Northern Pacific, or over areas that aren’t so cold, and they’re much more moderate, and that has been the case,” says Jeff Andresen, a climatologist at Michigan State University.

If you’ve lived in Michigan, you know that weather can often be unpredictable. And just because we’ve had snow in the winter, doesn’t mean the trends of warmer winters is completely gone. It’s important to know that the climate and the weather aren’t the same thing.

“They’re obviously highly, highly related, but they’re just on different timeframes, and we have to remember that,” Andresen said. “So, one of the challenges of course, is, when we have a severe blizzard or storm like we did, before Christmas one might be inclined to say, ‘oh, that invalidates what we thought about a mild fall’, and we can’t say that.”

The important distinction is that climate is the long term patterns and trends of weather over long periods of time. Andresen expects those trends of warmer weather in Michigan to continue.

“We’re seeing that variability play an issue, it’s just that those cold winters, while they still occur, they’re less common, and less frequent than they were before, and at the same time, once in a while, now we get one of these really mild ones, that really hasn’t happened before,” he said.

Andresen says he expects a couple more weeks of irregularity in the weather before things go back to what we know as normal in the winter.