Another ‘smashed’ weather record: Local meteorologists, experts say the impacts are very real - The Boston Globe

Another ‘smashed’ weather record: Local meteorologists, experts say the impacts are very real - The Boston Globe

Back-to-back snow-starved winters. Warm, bare ski runs. Sloshy skating ponds and rinks. Winter the season is looking rather broken.

Now it turns out this year was especially troubling — and unprecedented in many ways.

Scientists from the European Union’s Copernicus Climate Change Service have confirmed that February 2024 was the hottest February ever recorded globally — in fact, it was the ninth month in a row to shatter the high-temperature threshold (record warmth).

To experts across New England, the records keep piling up and are alarming.

“Another month, another smashed global temperature record,” said Jennifer Francis, a senior scientist at the Woodwell Climate Research Center in Falmouth. “We’ve known the next strong El Niño…would boost temperatures, but records have been broken by astounding margins in many regions of the globe, including New England.”

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The latest data reveals that February was 1.77 Celsius warmer than the pre-industrial (1850 to 1900) average for the month and 0.81 Celsius above 1991-2020 levels, according to Copernicus records.

Other key data findings include:

• February 2024 averaged 13.54 degrees Celsius (56.37 degrees Fahrenheit) — 0.12°C or 32 degrees F warmer — than the previous warmest February, in 2016.

• All-time high ocean temperatures: The average global sea surface temperature for February 2024 was 21.06°C (69.9 degrees Fahrenheit), the highest for any month in the dataset, surpassing the previous record of August 2023, at 20.98°C (69.7 degrees F).

• The average daily sea surface temperature reached a new absolute high of 21.09 degrees C at the end of the month.

“We’ve experienced this warming locally as the waters off the coast of Massachusetts are warm, in lock step with the rest of New England, particularly the Gulf of Maine, which we are a part of,” said Pete Bouchard, a meteorologist with NBC10 Boston. “The rate of warming is three times that of the rest of the world’s oceans.”

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He and other meteorologists and scientists said the impact the warming climate has on shifting weather patterns is very real. Higher ocean temperatures cause sea levels to rise through the thermal expansion of water. This temperature rise is likely to be quite small at first. However, the volume of water affected is immense, according to scientists with the National Center for Atmospheric Research.

“Rising ocean levels contribute to more frequent coastal flooding and beach erosion, even without a storm,” Bouchard added. “Marine heat waves are becoming more common too, with extreme pressure placed on our native species like lobsters, clams and oysters, whose shells are also vulnerable to ocean acidification directly related to climate change.”

Francis noted: “Heat accumulated in the oceans is re-emerging to warm the air, pushing normal temperatures into uncharted territory.”

The winter as a whole also set many high-temperature marks in New England:

• Boston and Providence experienced their 7th warmest winter 2023-24 winter — the average temperature of 36.4 degrees in Boston was 3.9 degrees above average.

• Boston is on track to end up with back-to-back winters with less than 20 inches — the first time since records began in 1872.

• Amherst experienced its warmest meteorological (Dec-Feb) winter on record since records started in 1893 there.

• And in Worcester, it was the second warmest winter; and third warmest for Hartford.

The causes of this rising heat are two-fold, say scientists: Human-induced climate change of carbon dioxide and methane emissions from the burning of fossil fuels — coal, oil, and natural gas — is the primary driver, trapping heat in the atmosphere. Second is the El Niño, a warming of the central Pacific that changes global weather patterns.

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The warming trend in New England, in particular, has altered many aspects of people’s lives, the recreational side being one of them. Warmer temps that gave us rain instead of fluffy snow meant many ski slopes were left to keep their snow-making machines churning on overdrive this past winter, while ponds and outdoor rinks were a slushy mess at times.

The Boston Common Frog Pond Skating Rink closed a number of times due to rainy and warm weather and even had to cut its season short by a week. “We were hoping to close on March 6th, but the weather turned very warm and we had difficulty holding the ice and it became unsafe at times,” said John Schaub, the rink’s general manager.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) plans to publish its own analysis for the month of February sometime next week that is expected to mirror these recent data from Copernicus.

Karin Gleason, an atmospheric scientist at NOAA, told Reuters: “I was just in the eastern part of North Carolina…and saw some trees in full bloom with blossoms all over the trees, and I’m thinking — it’s February. This just seems really odd.”

Marianne Mizera can be reached at marianne.mizera@globe.com. Follow her @MareMizera. Sabrina Shankman can be reached at sabrina.shankman@globe.com. Follow her @shankman.