How has the weather in your region changed in recent years?
Aside from heat that I am fundamentally not built for, we had an actual tornado near me yesterday. Tornadoes are not completely unheard I guess, but they’re not common or something that we really plan for where I live. Humidity has also been wildly over the top, and pretty consistent instead of occasional. It feels almost tropical, or what I would imagine tropical weather to be. I’m from a traditionally cold-ish, temperate place. We have always gotten all kinds of weird weather but it feels a lot more consistently steamy and intense than it used to. What weird new weather things are happening where you live? How are you adapting to them? (How on earth do you cope when everything feels wet?)
I grew up in southern Oregon, and that was common, but moved to Seattle in 2007. I have seen the summers go from very temperate to wildfire season in that pretty short amount of time. Summers feel like the summers growing up
We have always had tornados but I'm the last 10 years it seems like we're getting more and they do more damage.
The most noticeable are the number of heavy rain events and flooding. Again 10 years ago while we had floods it was not as common to have flooding in all sorts of local areas. Now we see roads closed and small areas of flood damage where we used to only see large 100 year floods.
The heat sucks and has always sucked it just sucks more now.
Our summers have been getting hotter each year. Used to be we had about a week of very hot weather (for the region), but temperate the rest of the summer. Now we get multiple weeks of heat, and the daily temps are higher. Pretty miserable since most homes around here don't have AC or heat pumps.
Our summers and winters have gotten hotter every year. We now usually get tons of forest fire smoke in the summers. In 2019 it was so bad everything was like orange silent hill. You could barely see across the street.
Smoke was never a thing when I was growing up. And it was rare to have a delayed snowfall until late November or December, but that's becoming more common too.
I'm unsure of this next part(anecdotal and hard to look up) but I remember way more butterflies as a kid. Big ones too! But now we usually only get smaller ones and they're usually less common to see.
My highschool hasn't seen a snow day in about 5 years, and we had several years where they had to extend the school year from so many snow days.
The lake nearby froze over solid enough when my dad was a teenager, he and his brothers would drive on the ice for fun donuts without worrying about the tires. It hasn't frozen over since I was a child.
The summers of my childhood rarely topped 95, but now not only is that the new "average", it's gotten to 90s in the middle of winter multiple times in the last ten years.
Recently saw a thermometer over 100, which based on temperature records, that only happened a handful of times from 1900-2000.
We used to have winters over here. When I was a child we always had ice and snow, a market on the lake, and a kind of tour de france for ice skating going through many cities. That's all gone now, it's just rainy.
When i was a kid we had sometimes 60cm of snow over night and the whole town stood still and we skied down the mainstreet. At night it was absolutely magical. Now we have rain and dirt.