When I was a child, my mother was convinced I'd become a meteorologist. It could have been the wide-eyed, long stares at clouds; or Volume "T" in our collection of The World Book Encyclopedia naturally falling open to its "Tornado" entry; or else every other school library book being a picture-stuffed weather tome; or my ponderous lecturing to her on the authoritative meteorological depths any bright 9-year-old might possibly manage; or perhaps constant monitoring of The Weather Channel out of one corner of my eye during the thunderstorm tumult of the summer months.
In the wake of my Bachelor of Fine Arts in Painting, the Weatherman Theory can be safely put to rest (as can my father's prediction, as he always figured on my becoming a computer programmer). As with many interests - astronomy, natural history, psychology and sociology - my intuitive grasp of meteorology, its theories and its occasional application in life was enough to satisfy me and essentially precluded any serious study. My dislike of linear processes shouldn't be overlooked, either; I score in the top 1-3% in mathemeatical concepts but drop to the top 20% in computation (so many steps, so few correct answers!) High school, miraculously, managed only to sour chemistry and physics. The rest of science belongs to me as a source of reasonable, sometimes whimsical, amateur assertions that I playfully set to circumstances. I snatch bits of data, I hypothesize, I reconcile the prediction with an outcome; I move to the next situation.
The slow emasculation of Ohio summers over the past ten years or so has caught my attention. Growing up, turbulence would kick up thunderstorms with a moderate frequency; perhaps fifteen to twenty stormy days in the twelve weeks leading June to August. Certainly, the looking glass of youth is distorted and wont to expand notable events - but after learning about El Nino, my impressions were confirmed. Never a doomsday cheerleader, I am confident that this ocean temperature disruption is a common occurrence and is so prominent in science simply because of growing knowledge and awareness of subtle phenomena, aided by the increasing sensitivity of instruments. But I do not dispute its effects: Northern Ohio summers have been mild and benign since the mid-Nineties, often with less than five days of unstable weather patterns moving through the area. Puzzling, I'm sure, to scientists; troublesome for farmers; and certainly disappointing for me, who has always looked to the horizon on hot, sticky days, searching for approaching thunderheads with the same anticipation Spaniards hold for running through the streets with bulls.
Year after year, summer wouldn't quite be summer. No rain, no thunder! And then, six months later, winter wouldn't quite be winter; snow I enjoy as much as storms and to experience more than one 50-degree Brown Christmas was grounds for petitioning God for a weather refund. Well, I couldn't say I hadn't been warned:
The NOAA spotted old El Nino working his voodoo again and predicted a mild winter. In fact, this shaded map could have worked just as easily for most of the winters before it - the winter of 1995-1996 is the only year that bucked the trend.
Well, the only year until this one.
Call this simplistic, facile, amateurish: I've found a more or less direct correlation between mild, calm summers and tepid winters, connected by abrupt transition seasons consisting of cold-until-May springs and short-sleeves-until-November autumns. I can't recall 1995-1996 but for the extremely white Christmas it offered. This year, however, I paid quite a bit of attention.
Spring was smooth; ever so smooth. I'd call it picture perfect, with temperatures steadily rising a fraction of a degree every day. It was rainy, yes, but it wasn't downright weird. Summer was closer to what I remember years ago; this year we experienced at least ten thundershowers or storms. I did see a return to the El Nino symptom - our stifling drought brought on by a turn to ineffably polite weather, so the atmospheric deviation came to pass at least partially. Autumn, however, was just as uncannily effortless as spring. Who cares if the leaves are behind schedule when the temperature is just right? My markers are frost outside at a reasonable point in time (mid-October, I believe); kids requiring coats for Halloween (my folks always needed to be creative lest they mar the costume) and snowflakes before Thanksgiving.
Snowflakes in fact stuck before Thanksgiving and thus ushered in what Clevelanders are understanding as one the colder, snowier winters on record.
NOAA is baffled. I contend our summer was more normal, so our winter is closer to the mark. Besides, I'm a sucker for snow and thunderstorms; for whatever reason the clouds do what they do, they've given me what I like best.