U.S. seems to have largely escaped winter
The continental United States, it's been a very warm winter.
"The talk across the whole country has been, 'Where has winter been?'" said Dale Eck, who runs the global forecast center at the Weather Channel in Atlanta.
The answer: A combination of factors has trapped the winter's cold air in the northern latitudes over Canada and Alaska.
"If you look at U.S. temperatures, you'd say, 'Wow, it was a warm winter,'" said Dan Cayan, a climate researcher at the U.S. Geological Service and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla. And you'd be right.
"But," he added, "in the coastal West, it's been cool."
Sunshine and nearly 80-degree temperatures in downtown Los Angeles this week — combined with an early January heat wave and vicious Santa Ana winds in late November and early December — might leave locals with the impression that winter has been similarly balmy in Southern California.
But while the season is shaping up to be exceptionally dry, it has not been unusually warm.
In fact, November's average high temperature of 69 degrees in downtown Los Angeles was four degrees below normal, and December's average of 66 was two degrees below normal, said Ryan Kittell, a forecaster at the National Weather Service's Oxnard office.
