It's December. America is virtually snow-free.
In a season traditionally devoted to snow, a rash of unseasonably warm weather means that, right now in the United States, there's hardly any of it.
A coast-to-coast holiday heat wave means that, on Thursday, the last day of November, just 7.6 percent of the country was snow-covered, about one-third of the typical value over the past 15 years. Over the past seven days, 1,550 record high temperatures have been set across the country compared with just 15 record lows, a 100 to one clip. Nearly every corner of the country is warmer than normal.
In parts of the West, it's actually T-shirt weather: Temperatures in the Rockies, for example, are more typical of mid-June than late-November. On Monday, Denver reached 81 degrees—some 34 degrees above normal and warmer than Los Angeles, Houston, or Tampa, Florida—the warmest temperature ever recorded there during the month of November. On the same day, it was so unusually warm in Salt Lake City that the city broke its record high—at 2:20 a.m. Tucson, Arizona, set record highs all four days of the long Thanksgiving weekend, peaking at 92 degrees on Sunday—the highest reading ever measured there so late in the year.
(Photo: Levi Cowan/Tropical Tidbits)