You're hot, then you're cold
Sorry to Katy Perry
Every year, one of New York City’s funniest days is the day after the first day of warmth.
Always in March or April, the city’s temperature will briefly climb into the mid-70s, even 80s (Fahrenheit of course), and everyone living there will celebrate with shorts, sundresses, and blankets laid out in their favorite parks. Many of them will then do the exact same thing the following day without glancing at their phone to check the weather, where they would have learned that it was Winter once again. 20-somethings rubbing their arms for warmth power walk down windy sidewalks, their flip-flops slapping the concrete harder and harder as they pick up the pace trying not to turn into New York’s newest statue. Something like the opposite happens every October, when everyone piles into the subway wearing a peacoat the day after the first day of cold, soaking their body-length jackets in sweat as the city’s 70-plus degree breath exhales onto them from the open doors and hot subway air broils them like a hair dryer.
I used to laugh at these people (really, I’m still laughing at them), but I too have lately experienced some swings in temperature that even my weather app was struggling to keep up with.
I went home to Virginia for a wedding shindig last month, and on one afternoon I was lightly sweating in a t-shirt, shorts, and flip-flops as my parents and I played a lawn game called kubb, hurling wooden batons at wooden blocks stationed like sentries on either side of our makeshift field. When I opened the door to go on a run the next morning, snow had glazed over yesterday’s arena and the temperature had plummeted some 50 degrees, as though Miami weather had turned into Toronto in the span of 18 hours. For the city of Alexandria — just next door to us — the abrupt change was record-setting.
The wildest 24-hour swing on record still belongs to what already feels — climatologically — like a different age. Between January 14 and 15 in 1972, the temperature in Loma, Montana, whipped from -54 to 49 degrees, a difference of 103 degrees that happened as a warm breeze spilled over the Rocky Mountains and scared off a pocket of trapped Arctic air.
That record is crazy enough that it might hang on for a few more decades, but whiplashing temperatures are becoming a more common phenomenon because of — please conceal your shock — climate change.
There are several sciency science reasons as to why this is happening, but perhaps the most important one is that the planet’s rising temperature is messing with Earth’s atmospheric currents. Jetstreams that usually follow a strong, consistent path have begun to loop, drift, and pause, a bit like a drunk guy who’s forgotten the way home. This allows balloons of hot air to float north and bubbles of cold air to slip south, raising or dropping the temperature in just a few hours. According to a study published in Nature Climate Change, the regions that will endure these swings the most in coming decades are all of South America, the entire Mediterranean, eastern China, and the western United States, so Loma will get a chance to recapture its title if somewhere else manages to grab it.
Most people will experience all this as a series of annoyances. It’ll be impossible to lay out the same basic outfit from one day to the next, some of us will be scraping frost off our windshields even though we’d just gone swimming the day before — stuff like that. But as with many climate-related happenings, one person’s annoyance is another’s danger.
Cold snaps can do a lot of damage by, say, freezing roads and sidewalks on days when people weren’t expecting it, but that Nature Climate Change study says that sudden temperature spikes are far more deadly.
Heat overwhelms the body much more easily than cold. Someone who goes outside to rake leaves, mow their lawn, or even just to go for a walk can be blindsided by temperatures that are some 20, 30, 40 degrees warmer than they had been even half a day earlier. If they don’t have immediate access to water, air conditioning, ice, or anything else that might immediately cool them off, they could very well be in trouble.
This is all to say that this blog has actually just been a long-winded advertisement for the Weather Channel, or for poking your head out the door real quick before heading out. The temperature isn’t always going to be what you think.
Full points for that title! xD