Laura Parker and Jessie Halladay
[USA TODAY, Thursday, August 3, 2000, 3A]

If you think the weather is strange this summer, your're right. It is. It's been cool in the Northeast where it should be sweltering, and sweltering in the upper Midwest where it should be cool. The south is so parched that deer are dying in the fields of Texas. The Flint River in southwest Georgia is so low that the striped bass has completely disappeared from the upper channel. In fact, the entire state of Georgia, as well as Alabama, has been declared an agricultural disaster area.

In the West, dry winds and weeks without rain have created a tinderbox so dry that the Army and Marines have been called up to fight the worst fire season since 1988. Three dozen giant fires have consumed from than 3.5 million acres of forestland and destroyed seven homes in nine states. And August has only just begun.

Even up in International Falls, Minn., where balmy and 69 is the norm, the thermostat seems like it's been stuck in the 90s for weeks. "We're supposed to be the ice box of the nation," says Diane Dickson, the manager of the local Dairy Queen, where Blizzards, an ice cream tret, are selling at a brisk pace. "It's been very hot."

Weather-linked Incidents
The weather, as usual, is blamed for a host of other occurrences, from power blackouts in California caused by a heat wave to pitifully small crowds at Atlantic Ocean beach resorts because of cold rains. The Federal Aviation Administration is blaming this summer's snarled air traffic, in part, on an increase in thunderstorms in the Midwest and East.

The weather has been so grim in New England that vacationers are fleeing. In Boston, the temperature did not reach 90 degrees once in July. It also rained almost twice as much as usual: 5.2 inches, compared with the average 2.84.

"Whenever the weather is this bad for this long, renters will come to the cottage owners and say they have to leave because of a death in the family and ask for a refund," says Wendy Northcross of the Cape Cod Chamber of Commerce. "The owners have gotten pretty savvy about this. A lot of them ask to see a copy of the obituary."

Says Dean O'Keefe, marketing manager at Six Flags New England in Agawam, Mass., "We've had more staff than visitors on some days." Not that the weather has been all bad. New York's unseasonably heavy rains and cool weather have kept the mosquito population small. That's a huge help to officials fighting the mosquito-carried West Nile virus outbreak there.

Washington, D.C., which is usually miserably humid this time of year, had the coolest July since 1918.

Along Tornado Alley in north Texas, Oklahoma and Kansas, there have been fewer tornadoes. That's good news. The sizzling Texas heat is not."I'm getting the hell out of hell," says Allan Dale, 72, a retiree who has lived in El Paso for the past 15 years.

Hellish summer weather along the Rio Grande River is normal for July and August. What's not normal is that it started in May. Temperatures rose above 100 degrees in May for the first time in three decades, according to meteorologists in San Antonio and Austin. Across the South and Southwest, the drought continues into its third rainless summer.

In Texas, 195 of 254 counties in the state have been declared disaster areas. The city of Throckmorton, 160 miles west of Dallas, has 60 days of water left and is building a 20-mile emergency pipeline to the city of Graham, which has offered to share its water.

"If you could see what the fields are like, you'd just want to sit down and cry," says Shirley Matejka, meteorologist in the National Weather Service's San Antonio office in west-central Texas. "They're bare, they're brown. Sometimes you aren't sure if the farmer has planted anything. It just looks pitiful." San Angelo got 0.02 inches of rain last month, compared with an average 4.5 inches.

Why Is This Happening?
Depending on who's doing the explaining, weird weather has many causes. The Millennium theory is currently in vogue with those who associate hurricanes, droughts and floods with prophecies that anticipate the end of the world.

Pollution and urbanization get the blame for heat waves in places such as Florida and Southern California. Last week, searing heat prompted officials in Los Angeles to issue power-saving warnings that included turning down air conditioners.

Kert Davies of the Ozone Action group in Washington, D.C., sees the drought, heavy rains and heat as sure signs the ozone layer is disappearing. "They're in line with predictions that have been coming for years that global warming will affect the weather," he says.

National Weather Service experts blame weather-pattern culprit La Nina. Large pools in the Pacific Ocean near the equator cause cooler (La Nina) ocean temperatures, which, in turn, affect the jet stream as it crosses North America. That prompts a variety of weather anomalies, ranging from intense heat to chilly winds. Ants Leetmaa, director of the weather service's Climate Prediction Center in Camp Springs, Md., says a weakening La Nina has been affecting weather for two years. We're close to setting 100-year records in many areas," Leetmaa says.

Despite its weakening condition, La Nina is expected to continue to affect weather patterns for months to come. "We don't see it going away overnight," he says.

So is there any place at the moment where the weather is great? Try the Pacific Northwest, usually noted for its gray skies and endless mist. Mark Twain once wrote that he spent the worst winter in his life in Seattle one summer.

This year, the weather is a close to perfect as it gets. It was a big topic at Seattle's 16th Annual Block Watch Night Out Tuesday. "Everyone was talking about how nice it has been," says Ref Lindmark, a neighborhood activist. "The newcomers were asking if it's always this nice. And the old-timers said, "This is the nicest summer they could remember."

N.M. Felt the Heat in 2000
By John Fleck
[Albuquerque Journal, Saturday, December 30, 2000]

Despite a late autumn blast of cold, 2000 ended as one of the warmest years on record in New Mexico. It continues a warming trend dating to the mid-1970s, with four of the 10 warmest years on record in Albuquerque coming in the past decade. The second-warmest May on record capped the year, a month that brought drought and devastating forest fires to the state.

The cold October and November took the edge off what would otherwise have been a record warm year and also brought much-needed rain and snow. Despite a single cold spell, December was also 2 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than average through Friday, according to the National Weather Service.

New Mexico is officially out of the drought, according to the latest drought-severity maps compiled by the federal government's Climate Prediction Center. But coming after two consecutive dry winters, this year's wet spell is not yet enough to fill reservoirs and quiet concerns about the long-range water outlook for the state, said Charlie Liles, head of the National Weather Service's Albuquerque office. "We've really got to wait and see how the winter goes to see how we are," Liles said.

Snowpack in many of the state's mountains is still below normal for this time of year. Only the river basins with their headwaters in the Sangre de Cristos are significantly above normal, according to the Natural Resources Conservation Service.

For the first half of the year, La Nina -- a pool of colder-than-normal water in the Pacific -- dominated our weather. Forecasters blamed it for the dry winter of 1999-2000, a second consecutive such winter that laid the groundwork for the most devastating wildfire year in New Mexico history, with nearly half a million acres burned.

March was the exception, with 1.27 inches of rain at the Albuquerque airport, making it the second-wettest March since 1892. That was not enough to make up for the rest of the dry weather, leaving spring drier than average. The summer rains came early this year, but they were "sporadic and below par," according to Liles. That was especially true in Albuquerque, the state's largest population center, though other areas of the state saw a better monsoon, Liles said.

The National Weather Service station at the Albuquerque airport received 2.12 inches of rain during the monsoon season, 61 percent of normal. Statewide, New Mexico received 93 percent of its normal summer rain. When talking about weather, averages can be deceptive. It is almost always either wetter or drier than average, warmer or colder.

But the average temperatures told an especially meaningful story this year, with nine straight months in Albuquerque that were warmer than the long-range average. From January through the end of September, average monthly temperatures stayed above normal -- in some cases far above normal.

In Albuquerque, the average daytime high for May was 85, 5 degrees above normal. Overnight lows that month averaged 55, almost 6 degrees above the long-range average. Liles offered this unusual aside -- despite being so warm, Albuquerque never hit 100 degrees in 2000. Since 1954, we have averaged four 100-plus days a year. This year's high was 99 on June 15.

The forecast for precipitation in 2001 remains murky, but the National Weather Service expects the higher temperatures to continue. La Nina is still not gone completely, but it has weakened to near nothing, leaving forecasters with little to go on in predicting our late winter and spring precipitation. Computer climate simulations point toward a return of warm El Nino Pacific waters at some point in 2001.

If El Nino returns, that could mean a wet winter in 2001-2002. But it is not yet clear when that might happen.