Does the exceptionally warm weather lately mean we should brace for an extremely hot summer?
When low temperatures are the same as previous record highs, "that's incredible — to me, that's just mind-boggling," said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Climate Prediction Center. However, he said, it's not necessarily a harbinger of things to come. …
Halpert pointed to the freak snowstorms that hit in fall 2011, which prompted a lot of questions about whether the coming winter would be unusually cold and snowy. "Clearly, the answer was no," he said. Yet, he said, there's a chance summer could be on the warm side. The most recent outlook for June, July and August, a big-picture projection based on large-scale climate phenomena such as La Niña, was published on March 15. "There's a tilt in the odds toward a warmer summer for the southern two-thirds of the country, but it's not a guarantee," Halpert told OurAmazingPlanet. "We don't give guarantees in the climate business."
Meanwhile, Suzy Khimm studies unseasonably warm weather as economic stimulus.
The Dish 