Bad Winter

I know some of you will wholeheartedly disagree with me on this one, but the winter so far this year has sucked!  If memory serves, we've gotten roughly two-and-a-half inches of snow so far this winter and we've only had a handful of below-freezing days.  And all this with department stores starting to roll out their spring clothing lines.  I suffered through the hot, hot heat of summer with the expectation that I would feel sweet relief in the form of cold, snowy days on which to drink big, scary beers and make pots of soup.  And an unseasonably warm, dry winter has ruined everything.  It's a goddam travesty is what it is.

As it turns out, there are a couple of meteorological phenomena that have compounded to produce the horrific winter that we're currently experiencing.  I ran across a good article describing the reasons for our crappy winter at Discovery News, via Pharyngula.  The first reason is La Nina, which has pushed the jet stream north - interestingly, La Nina was partially responsible for last year's harsh winter weather - and La Nina has combined with Arctic Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation, which have matched their phases, pulling the few weather systems that form over North America out into the Atlantic. I don't claim to be well versed in meteorology, so I won't even attempt any sort of in-depth discussion of this process.  But according to the article, we may return to some semblance of a real winter later this month.  I suppose time will tell.

All I know is that this has been a really lame winter so far.