No Foolin’: Near 80 Sunday April 1st; IPCC links climate & extreme weather

Showers taper Friday morning

Sunshine returns for this weekend

50 degrees - average high in the metro this weekend

60s in northern Minnesota this weekend

70s in the metro and southern Minnesota Saturday

80+ degrees possible in the metro and southern Minnesota Sunday

82 record high Sunday at MSP Airport

90 degrees possible Sunday in Sioux Falls, Luverne, Pipestone and Canby?

Source: NWS

"June-tastic" pattern returns this weekend:

March will go out like a little baby kitten this year. And April 1st will feel like June. No foolin'.

A big league warm front will push north this weekend ahead of a strong developing low pressure system in the northern Rockies.

The warm surge will push temperatures +20 to +30 degrees vs. average again this weekend, and should assure the warmest March on record at most Minnesota locations.

Most models are hinting at cooler (but still above average) weather next week to open April. 50s and 60s should be more common instead of the 70s and 80s we'll see this weekend.

Wind Map: Visualizing the invisible wind:

Check out this cool visualization of surface wind data from the National Digital Forecast Database.

Source: http://hint.fm/wind/

"(For those of you chasing top wind speed, note that maximum speed may occur over lakes or just offshore.)

These are forecasts, downloaded once per hour. So what you're seeing is close to live data. We'd be interested in displaying data for the entire earth; if you know of a source of detailed live wind data for the entire globe, please let us know."

IPCC Report: Connecting the dots between climate change and extreme weather

A new report from the IPCC strengthens the cause-effect relationship between climate change and extreme weather.

The most alarming prediction from the report is that heat waves (like Minnesota had last summer that set record heat & dew points) that used to occur every 20 years on average... may now occur as often as every other year.

SOURCE: IPCC

More from the AP and Time:

(WASHINGTON) -- "Global warming is leading to such severe storms, droughts and heat waves that nations should prepare for an unprecedented onslaught of deadly and costly weather disasters, an international panel of climate scientists said in a new report issued Wednesday.

The greatest threat from extreme weather is to highly populated, poor regions of the world, the report warns, but no corner of the globe -- from Mumbai to Miami -- is immune. The document by a Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate scientists forecasts stronger tropical cyclones and more frequent heat waves, deluges and droughts.

The 594-page report blames the scale of recent and future disasters on a combination of man-made climate change, population shifts and poverty.

(PHOTOS: Cyclone Hits Southern India)

In the past, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, founded in 1988 by the United Nations, has focused on the slow inexorable rise of temperatures and oceans as part of global warming. This report by the panel is the first to look at the less common but far more noticeable extreme weather changes, which lately have been costing on average about $80 billion a year in damage."

"We mostly experience weather and climate through the extreme," said one of the report's top editors, Chris Field, an ecologist with the Carnegie Institution of Washington. "That's where we have the losses. That's where we have the insurance payments. That's where things have the potential to fall apart.

"There are lots of places that are already marginal for one reason or another," Field said. But it's not just poor areas: "There is disaster risk almost everywhere."

The report specifically points to New Orleans during 2005's Hurricane Katrina, noting that "developed countries also suffer severe disasters because of social vulnerability and inadequate disaster protection."

In coastal areas of the United States, property damage from hurricanes and rising seas could increase by 20 percent by 2030, the report said. And in parts of Texas, the area vulnerable to storm surge could more than double by 2080.

Already U.S. insured losses from weather disasters have soared from an average of about $3 billion a year in the 1980s to about $20 billion a year in the last decade, even after adjusting for inflation, said Mark Way, director of sustainability at insurance giant Swiss Re. Last year that total rose to $35 billion, but much of that was from tornadoes, which scientists are unable to connect with global warming. U.S. insured losses are just a fraction of the overall damage from weather disasters each year."

Here's the video from IPCC.

Source: IPCC via YouTube

PH