December 2018 Observations and Discussions

I'm at 1.33" ....wish it was snow!

Happy New year may 2019 please bring snow snow snow enough with the rain

Weather banter thread is locked but I thought I would share this article for the neophytes (like me):

Parts of the mid-Hudson got up to 27 percent more rain in 2018 than in a typical year, according to AccuWeather.

The weather forecasting service provided the rain tally as of Monday, while predicting between a half-inch and 1.5 inches of rain, and a chance of flooding, for much of Orange, Sullivan and Ulster counties on New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

Average annual rainfall tallies for the three counties range from 44 inches to 48 inches, but between 53 inches and 56 inches have soaked different parts of the region in 2018.

Most of the extra rain began falling in mid-summer.

Higher than average rain totals were common in 2018 in parts of Pennsylvania, New Jersey, New York and southern New England, said Rob Miller, a senior meteorologist with AccuWeather.

The reason? A change in the direction of the jet stream’s flow, Miller explained.

The jet stream, a strong air current that flows several miles above the earth, shifted to flowing from southwest to northeast, rather than traveling west to east.

Warmer-than-usual ocean temperatures threw off the jet stream’s flow, Miller said.

Cold Canadian air masses also failed to follow their normal pattern of sweeping away warm, wet air from the Hudson Valley.



Those air masses were knocked out of whack by an unusually strong Bermuda High, a semi-permanent high-pressure air mass over the island.

It was positioned in an atypical way that often failed to prevent warm, moist air from flowing into the Hudson Valley from the south and the Gulf of Mexico.

Miller said “it’s almost impossible to tell” whether global warming caused unusual weather patterns in 2018 because researchers need to “look at long-term weather trends, like over the last 10 or 20 years, not individual seasons.”

1.41" of rain for that event....

6.71" of rain in the month of December, can't make this stuff up!

A gust just came through for abot 15 seconds or so and if the weather station is to be believed, it was 58 mph. It blew over my grill, a first, and snapped a few trees. Everything else was tied down. Surprising

The final numbers for December 2018 are ugly.

The last 18 days of the month, 16 of them were above normal. The last 18 days were 5.7 degrees above the inflated 30 year average from 1981-2010.

There is no way to sugar coat this month, it was God awful. Throw in no measurable snow in Central Park and that's the icing on the cake.

The only positive is it was better than December 2015, but I'm hoping to never see a month like that again in my lifetime.