Unusually warm weather puts the East Coast in early bloom
NEW YORK — The cherry blossoms are blooming in Brooklyn by the thousands; daffodils are budding in the Bronx; and in Central Park, toddlers have yet to see a single snowflake this winter, the first time in more than a century that the city's most celebrated sledding slopes have been snow-free so long into the season.
Throughout the region, winter seems in full retreat.
Temperatures have been running 6 degrees above normal for at least a month, federal weather experts said. Winter coats are clinging to retail racks, not commuters' backs. Even the artificial snow on ski slopes is melting.
For New York, Washington and Boston this weekend, weather experts are forecasting April in January, with temperatures in the 60s -- and showers.
In fact, balmy weather is forecast for the entire Eastern Seaboard in the week ahead -- up to 20 degrees above normal in some areas -- according to the National Weather Service's Climate Prediction Center, while the West can expect abnormal cold.
This winter, the abnormal is becoming routine, with the natural contradictions of climate confounding seasonal expectations.
Three blizzards in as many weeks have buried Colorado in snow, with 10-foot-high drifts, and left thousands of people in Kansas and Nebraska without power.
Yet New Jersey had its warmest December in the 111 years on record. New York has not been so snowless since 1877. Even so, in each of the last four years, snowfall in Central Park set records, averaging twice the normal annual accumulation.
"Global warming?" said a panhandler in Manhattan's Washington Square, shaking a paper cup of change. "Maybe it's that El Nino thing."
Indeed, meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration credit a weak but influential El Nino current that has been stirring in the Pacific Ocean since the summer for unseasonably warm winter temperatures in the East. El Nino's warm ocean currents, which can affect weather patterns worldwide, are expected to moderate the Northeastern winter for much of the month.
"Is this part of global warming? No. This is cyclical," said meteorologist Dennis Feltgen at NOAA headquarters in Silver Spring, Md. "We have a moderate-strength El Nino in progress now, and it is doing everything that a moderate-strength El Nino is supposed to do, which is -- most of all -- to promote above-normal temperatures."
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