Aaaaanyway, things were VERY different this time last year. Check out this cool satellite photo of a massive bank of cumulus clouds just off the coast of New England exactly one year ago yesterday, as we were recoiling from one of the massive snowstorms that pummeled the Northeast. You almost can’t even SEE Nova Scotia. This effect is called “cloud streets” because of the lane-like appearance of the striations.

Meanwhile, over on the other side of the continent, our dear friend Karan is getting the treatment we were getting this time last year. Here’s yesterday’s “Photo of the Day” from the Earth Observatory, showing the extent of the snowfall in Washington and Oregon:

Somehow I don’t think that’s gonna melt itself away overnight.

This map shows the increase over the average temperature across the United States for the month of December 2011. According to the Blue Hill Observatory, last month was the second-warmest on record for the Boston area, and 2011 the fifth-warmest year overall.

NOAA says that we are in the midst of a La Niña cycle, but sort of a weak one. La Niña weather usually means more snow for us, but the predictions indicate that the Northeast will be spared a repeat of last year’s string of blizzards.

And now over to Chet with the sports!

My fellow New Englanders should feel a twinge of recognition looking at these pictures of cars trapped in the drifting snow on Chicago’s Lake Shore Drive during the storm on Tuesday.

Nobody here got trapped on the highway this time around, as far as I know, but instead people are having to contend with collapsing roofs from too much snow. The town where we live now has the rather dubious distinction of having received the most snow in the state for the last TWO storms. Yay us. Poor Charlotte is going to be going to school until July at this rate.

While most of the United States has been contending with the continental blizzard for the last couple of days, the northeastern corner of Queensland in Australia has been smacked with one of the worst typhoons in almost a century, Cyclone Yasi. This comes after the region has already been devastated by massive flooding. As one commenter noted somewhere on my Internet travels yesterday, the thing that makes a hurricane so much worse than blizzard is that at least you can shovel the snow.

Harvey Leonard in 1978

Harvey now

We’ve been getting hammered with snowstorm after snowstorm on what feels like an every-other-day basis for the last two weeks, and I think even the local weathermonkeys are getting a little fed up with it. I haven’t heard ol’ Harvey Leonard mention the Blizzard of ’78 in at least three days, and nobody likes to cash in on The Big One like Harv. Every significant snowfall for the last 30 years has had to bear comparison to that 1978 storm from every meteorologist from Hartford to Bangor, and no matter how much more snow any one of them might have dumped on us, somehow it always came up short in their estimation. I complained about it last winter, when we only had one or two storms of note, but it seems like this series of storm after storm may have finally shut them up.

FWIW, Boston.com did a slideshow of Boston’s worst snow storms in recent history after the Christmas blizzard, and the Blizzard of ’78 is only the SECOND-worst snowstorm on that list, behind a whopper of a storm we had in 2003. But even those storms pale in comparison to the ten worst snowstorms in world history. The Great Blizzard of 1888 dumped as much as 50 inches of snow in the Northeast, killing over 400 people.

Now you’ll excuse me while I go out and clear my driveway of the latest delivery.

Thankfully our snowblower came back from the shop a few days ago. It’s gonna take this guy FOREVER to clean up his driveway:

I asked for the snow fairy to come and clean up my driveway, but THIS wasn’t what I had in mind:

It’s getting so bad that the trees are giving up and moving to Florida:

According to the local meteorologists, we’ve got about 17 inches of snow in our neck of the woods, but some places already have as much as two feet:

Somehow, our little sliver of North America has been escaping the massive snowfalls that have buried the entire Midwest and even Europe these last couple of weeks, but yesterday the snowstorm we missed over the weekend gave a little back-kick and reminded us that we’re not immune. It only amounted to a couple of inches, which is negligible by our traditional standards, but because the weather people hadn’t anticipated it, nobody was prepared and the evening commute was a right bitch for most people. There was just enough snow that it needed to be cleared from our driveway, but not enough to start the snowblower, so I shoveled. It’s funny how much longer the driveway seems when you hold a shovel in your hand.

The snowstorm also screwed us out of the chance to see the total lunar eclipse last night. Not that I had the slightest intention of staying up until 2:30 in the morning to see it in the first place. If any of us are still alive in 2094, they say that’s the next time we’ll have the chance to see one on the same day as the Winter Solstice. Here’s one blogger I ran across who DID get to see it and took a couple of fuzzy pictures.

It could be worse. Here’s a picture of some people taking a hike in the snow IN AUSTRALIA WHERE IT IS THE MIDDLE OF SUMMER:

Now the question for us is whether there’s going to be another snowstorm over the weekend. Our Christmas weekend includes driving up to Maine to see our families, but the “Storm Of The Decade” currently washing away all of California could bring all of its moisture with it as it travels eastward due to an air current sometimes called the “Pineapple Express”. Given that the local meteorologists screwed the pooch a little with this storm, they are decidedly non-committal about what might happen over the weekend, saying there’s a 60% chance of a storm somewhere on the East Coast. Thanks, fellas, that clears up everything.

Now that we do have snow on the ground here, I’d just like to remind all my fellow Massholes that you need to clean the effing snow off of the roof of your car before you get out on the road and kill somebody.

This map of the United States shows the range between the highest and lowest recorded extreme temperatures for each state. I think the most notable is that Alaska and California only differ by one degree. The state with the widest range, though, is Montana. Our New England states, which traditionally pride themselves on their tough winters and humid summers, are surprisingly middle-of-the-pack. Florida has the smallest range of the continental states, since, as you can tell from the data points, it is just basically fucking hot there all the time.

I’d love to see this broken down to a finer level of granularity so you could see the actual hot and cold spots in a given state.

1. 2005
2. 2007
3. 2009
4. 1998 (hey, how’d that get in here?)
5. 2002
6. 2003
7. 2006
8. 2004
9. 2001
10. 2008

Noticing a trend? No? Maybe this NY Times infographic might help:

The first six months of 2010 have already cinched this year taking the #1 spot on this list.

You might like the NYT article that graph came from. It’s actually about how Congress and the Obama Administration are avoiding bringing up the climate bill that desperately needs passing. This Orion Magazine article by author Bill McKibben is even a little more pointed.

And for the denialists among you, a different Top Ten List: Ten Key Indicators That Global Warming is Undeniable. Stick that in your teabag and drink it.

It was officially 100° in Boston on Tuesday, which may not sound like that big of a deal to people who live in warmer parts of the country, but it has only happened twice in the last decade and only a handful of times in the last 100 years or so.

Tuesday also happened to be the point of Earth’s aphelion — the time of year when the planet is closest to the Sun — but this National Geographic article explains that the heat wave and the aphelion really have nothing to do with one another.