2011 is now the wettest year on record in Hartford. Climatologists at UMass Amherst say the storm that pushed through the region early this week brought total precipitation for the year to more than 66 inches – the previous record had been just over 65 inches. Michael Rawlins, manager of the UMass Climate System Research Center, says Hartford and other northeast areas saw exceptionally large volumes of precipitaiton in August and september, when tropical systems Irene and Lee came through.
He says the precipitation trend and a decade-long warming trend — November, for instance was Vermont's warmest ever on record — is consistent with models scientists use to predict the mid-and long-term effects of climate change on regional weather systems.
And Rawlins notes that in colder regions — like northern New England — warmer air in winter can sometimes lead to the seemingly paradoxical outcome of heavier snowfall.
"When you have an atmosphere that's cold enough, well below zero Celsius, thirty-two Fahrenheit, you warm it up a little bit, now you can hold more moisture, produce more snowfall in the coldest times of months. We expect as the climate warms, that you'll get less snow in times like early December and March. Those will become rain events as we get warmer."
Rawlins was at a gathering of some 20,000 geophysicits in San Francisco this week. The consensus there, he says, is consistent with findings by the International Panel on Climate Change that human activity is highly likely to be the cause of the planet's warming.