Winter Has Arrived

"Baby, It's Cold Outside" 

"Back in the day", this was the theme of a familiar ballad sung by a suitor to his date while urging her to stay indoors. It was winter time.

Winter has arrived. It came in January this year bringing Helena, who  arrived on-board The Polar Express, using the common PolarVortex on the track of the well-known Northwesterly Jetstream. This usually occurs in our northerly areas and usually brings trouble.

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Helena is a winter storm expected to dump a few feet of snow with temperatures that can dive to dangerous levels. Pieces of this constant-coldpolar vortex have again escaped from the Arctic region depositing frigid air that will put 25 million Americans under windchill conditions of below zero conditions. Wind blasts will cause temperatures to plunge 20 to 45 degrees for a week before it moves on to the eastern USA. If its cold here, it must be really frigid in Norway!

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According to Judah Cohen, the director of Seasonal Forecasting, an Atmospheric  Research center in the US, “Siberia is the refrigerator of the Northern Hemisphere where air masses area become chilled.”  Early in the
calendar year, the air from Siberia is always chilled by the snow-covered area  and later exported by the circling jet stream over the United States. At times, this frigid jetstream enters areas of low pressure and sags southernly, bringing unusual snowfalls and chilling temperatures.
So, one might expect that this airflow must do the same to the Scandinavian countries.

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Norway is thought to be a cold, wet country with the same latitude as our Alaska, Greenland and also Siberia. However, the Atlantic Ocean has it’s own currents working. Norway has a pleasant climate caused by warm ocean

Gulf Stream Atlantic path.

waters  that actually originate in the Gulf of Mexico! This water flows northerly up to the ‘Northland’ becoming known as The Gulf Stream of warm water/air currents.Eastern Atlantic waters are warmer! Norway has a friendlier climate  along the east coast of Norway! The coldest areas in their winters are often inland or far to the north in Norway. While all may see snow, Polar Expresses are rare. ‘Mean’ (average) temperatures in winter months are above freezing along the coast up to the Lofodten area (Northland). The coldest area, the “Finnmark Plateau” has average monthly temperatures around -15°s. .

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As of January 6th, 2017, ( today) the eastern city of Bergen has a temperature of 6° while Oslo thermometers on the southwestern side  read 3°. By Saturday, Oslo’s weekend temperature was expected to drop to -6°. That looks cold as we would expect, but wait! Their temps are registered “Celsius”. We use “Fahrenheit”! There IS a difference!

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Bergen’s 6° C  would be our 43° F !. Oslo’s 3° would be our 37° F. It would drop all the way down to..21° on our scale. That's not very cold. I guess     it all depends on how you look at it.

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Anders Celsius

This Celsius/Fahrenheit thing is strange.Celsius, also known as 'centigrade', is a scale and a unit of measurement for temperature used by most countries in the world. It is named after the Swedish astronomer Anders Celsius(1701–1744), who developed a  temperature scale.In the Fahrenheit scale, water boils at 212 degrees. and the freezing point at 32.

Daniel Fahrenheit

 It was developed by Daniel Gabriel Fahrenheit, a German-born scientist who lived and worked primarily in the Netherlands.The common feeling about 'Celsius' is that it is a scientific scale whereas 'Fahrenheit' is a human scale. In Fahrenheit 0° means it’s cold out and 100° is pretty hot! In ‘Celsius’ 0° is chilly while 100° in not survivable!  0° C is 32°F   0°F= -17.77778°C!   ( Boiling water)
 If one is a weather forecaster,  a conversion can be used quickly.

To convert 20 degrees Celsius to degrees Fahrenheit: Use the easy formula

                                                     T(°F) = 20°C × 9/5 + 32 = 68 °F

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Traffic pileup in Southern US

But, even reading in Celsius, winter weather may be ‘cold’. Sweden is forecasted to have  it’s coldest winter in years with piles of snow and low temperatures  according to a three-month forecast from the Danish Meteorology Institute. They expect a weak jetstream which will bring in high pressure and cooler temperatures. Those unruly jet-streams can cause European weather problems very much like ours in the USA, but they still are on the warmer side of the ocean!

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AS we speak, Helena is  'doing a number' down south. Traffic accidents and winter deaths are piling up as thestorm moves to the East.  Winter Storm Watchers have been experiencing unusual conditions in Alabama and North Carolina as winter storm Helena brings ice, sleet and heavy snow to people who may not even own a shovel.



Maybe Norway weather isn’t so bad after all!