Aside from heat that I am fundamentally not built for, we had an actual tornado near me yesterday. Tornadoes are not completely unheard I guess, but they’re not common or something that we really plan for where I live. Humidity has also been wildly over the top, and pretty consistent instead of occasional. It feels almost tropical, or what I would imagine tropical weather to be. I’m from a traditionally cold-ish, temperate place. We have always gotten all kinds of weird weather but it feels a lot more consistently steamy and intense than it used to. What weird new weather things are happening where you live? How are you adapting to them? (How on earth do you cope when everything feels wet?)
We have a small mixed veg farm and see a lot of changes. Especially recently. The past four years have been wild.
Our winters have gone from snow and cold October through April when I was a kid. To a few weeks of snow and cold in February mostly. We live on a very large salt water lake that used to freeze solid in winter. It doesn’t freeze enough to go ice fishing on now.
Our autumn has extended into December each year. We keep outdoor gardens from April to November now and in the 80’s when I was a kid I covered up every Halloween costume with a snow suit and fought my way to people’s doors.
Our springs have little to no rain when compared historically. We are by the Atlantic ocean and fog and rain are part of life but not so much any more.
Summers are hot now. Very hot with very high humidity. We’ve started having forest fires which were rare before due to the wet environment. Rurally there are water shortages from wells in many areas.
We’ve always had hurricanes but now they are much much more frequent and much more devastating. We are also having flash floods now regularly and power outages from heat which was previously unheard of.
We are seeing more large predator sharks and bluebottle jellyfish from across the Atlantic and our fishing grounds are moving further north as the ocean warms.
The forests are very dry and we are losing species to invasives, temperature extremes and bugs at unprecedented rates. Migratory birds are fewer than ever and we tend to have a lot of summering and breeding grounds here. The bugs don’t coat the car like they used to when we drive to town for groceries and we see this in our gardens and greenhouses as well.
It’s scary stuff. We live in an area where we can watch the changes happen in real time and yet deniers are everywhere.
Summer is now Wildfire Season, and we can expect smoky air off and on for pretty much all of August.
I grew up in southern Oregon, and that was common, but moved to Seattle in 2007. I have seen the summers go from very temperate to wildfire season in that pretty short amount of time. Summers feel like the summers growing up
Ha, in the mid 2010s I looked at a job in Josephine County but wasn’t sure I could handle fire season. Joke’s on me I guess!
Yeah, it was something I forgot about until it started happening here. It really sucks to have to choose between air quality or comfortable temps inside your house.
(In Jutland) The heatwaves are stronger and longer, the sudden miniature monsoons are more random and cause more damage. The weather was always unstable here but it’s becoming more extreme. We are not coping, we are not preparing. A good portion of the population doesn’t even think it’s happening.
Sadly that last bit is also true where I am. Ugh.
We have always had tornados but I’m the last 10 years it seems like we’re getting more and they do more damage.
The most noticeable are the number of heavy rain events and flooding. Again 10 years ago while we had floods it was not as common to have flooding in all sorts of local areas. Now we see roads closed and small areas of flood damage where we used to only see large 100 year floods.
The heat sucks and has always sucked it just sucks more now.
The last time there was enough snow to honestly merit a school cancellation and allow for sledding was in 2007.
Our summers have been getting hotter each year. Used to be we had about a week of very hot weather (for the region), but temperate the rest of the summer. Now we get multiple weeks of heat, and the daily temps are higher. Pretty miserable since most homes around here don’t have AC or heat pumps.
My highschool hasn’t seen a snow day in about 5 years, and we had several years where they had to extend the school year from so many snow days.
The lake nearby froze over solid enough when my dad was a teenager, he and his brothers would drive on the ice for fun donuts without worrying about the tires. It hasn’t frozen over since I was a child.
The summers of my childhood rarely topped 95, but now not only is that the new “average”, it’s gotten to 90s in the middle of winter multiple times in the last ten years.
Recently saw a thermometer over 100, which based on temperature records, that only happened a handful of times from 1900-2000.
Our summers and winters have gotten hotter every year. We now usually get tons of forest fire smoke in the summers. In 2019 it was so bad everything was like orange silent hill. You could barely see across the street.
Smoke was never a thing when I was growing up. And it was rare to have a delayed snowfall until late November or December, but that’s becoming more common too.
I’m unsure of this next part(anecdotal and hard to look up) but I remember way more butterflies as a kid. Big ones too! But now we usually only get smaller ones and they’re usually less common to see.
We used to have winters over here. When I was a child we always had ice and snow, a market on the lake, and a kind of tour de france for ice skating going through many cities. That’s all gone now, it’s just rainy.
When i was a kid we had sometimes 60cm of snow over night and the whole town stood still and we skied down the mainstreet. At night it was absolutely magical. Now we have rain and dirt.
Yeah, as kids, not so long ago like 12-15 years we built Iglus in our driveway, now it just a normal driveway just not so hot as in the summer.
