Northeast warming faster than rest of US
For one scientist, climate change in the Northeast announces itself in the abnormal appearances of warm-water fish – an abundance of mahi-mahi and unprecedented sightings in January of Gulf Stream flounder and juvenile black sea bass in shallow waters off New England.
“Nobody had ever seen that before,” said Glen Gawarkiewicz of the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution in Massachusetts.
For another scientist, the phenomenon materializes in ocean temperatures, which have been rising for more than a generation, influencing coastal weather and pushing snowfall farther inland.
“Our winters now are not like our winters before,” said Lenny Giuliano, state meteorologist in Rhode Island.
As water temperatures rise in the Atlantic Ocean and its connected gulfs and bays, the warmth may spread inland and generate temperature variations at the county level.
The water-to-land effect appears along the Great Lakes, which also are warming, said Mark Wysocki, New York state climatologist and a professor at Cornell University.
“There’s a very strong connection,” Wysocki said.
Though the Southwest saw the greatest rise in average air temperatures during the past five decades, data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration shows the Northeast warmed the most over both longer and shorter time spans.
Nowhere more so than Rhode Island: The state’s average temperature has increased 3.64 degrees compared with its 20th-century norm, according to records dating back to 1895.
States could be seeing a “troughing” effect, in which cold air drops from the north and draws warmer air up the coast, said David Robinson, the New Jersey state climatologist at Rutgers University.
Such an effect caused 50 mph wind gusts on Halloween night in New Jersey, Robinson said. He linked it to a tornado in Morris County, about 25 miles west of New York City.
Wysocki points to a naturally occurring shift in an air pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation, which can play a role in air temperatures in the Northeast.
Many agree that water temperatures probably play a role.
“You see so much variability in temperature over land throughout the year,” said Ambarish Karmalkar, a researcher at the University of Massachusetts and the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Northeast Climate Adaptation Science Center. “Variability over the ocean is much smaller. … It takes much longer to warm the ocean and takes much longer to cool it.”
Though researchers said the dynamic hasn’t fully been studied, data shows the effect down to the county level. Over the past five years, the four Connecticut counties hugging the coastline averaged 2.9 degrees warmer than normal, compared with 2.6 degrees for the four inland counties.
In Rhode Island, a half-degree difference separated Washington County on the coast and Providence County in the north. In Massachusetts, temperatures in Nantucket and Boston registered nearly a full degree higher than average compared with inland areas around the town of Amherst in Hampshire County.
Differences of 1 or more degrees separated Wicomico County on Maryland’s Delmarva Peninsula from the interior of the state, as well as Philadelphia from the Allegheny Mountains and downstate New York from the Adirondacks.
It’s even more amplified in Pennsylvania and New York where mountain ranges act as natural barriers, blocking warmer air coming from the coast.
“It’s hard for a marine climate to move far inland,” Wysocki said.
In general, climatologists and other researchers in the Northeast said that although there’s no doubt global climate change drives warmer air and water temperatures overall, there’s still much to learn about the interaction between the two. Among the most important inquiries is determining what’s here to stay and what will change with the wind.