Rare March soaking rain; February temps alarming some

First, weather news you can use right now. Low pressure deepens over Rochester, Minn., early Tuesday. Waves of rain develop overnight and roll through in the morning. Your Tuesday morning commute looks wet and potentially thundery. Rain changes to snow for those of you in the Northland.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's 4 km NAM model simulated radar reflectivity shows waves of rain and snow spinning around the developing low pressure swirl.

1- to 2-inch rainfall totals

The latest trends favor some hefty soaking rains with this system. Most of central and eastern Minnesota should easily pick up a widespread half-inch to 1 inch-plus.

Liquid precipitation totals of 2 to 3 inches are likely from Duluth north along the North Shore. Some of that will fall as snow.

Winter storm watch north

The atmosphere over northeast Minnesota is just cold enough to change the rain over to wet snow. Some of the totals could be heavy. Winter storm watches are flying from the Duluth National Weather Service office starting Tuesday night.

NORTHERN COOK/NORTHERN LAKE-SOUTHERN LAKE/NORTH SHORE-SOUTHERN COOK/NORTH SHORE-INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...ISABELLA...TWO HARBORS...SILVER BAY...

GRAND MARAIS

337 PM CDT MON MAR 14 2016

...WINTER STORM WATCH IN EFFECT FROM LATE TUESDAY NIGHT THROUGH EARLY THURSDAY MORNING...

THE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN DULUTH HAS ISSUED A WINTER STORM WATCH...WHICH IS IN EFFECT FROM LATE TUESDAY NIGHT THROUGH EARLY THURSDAY MORNING.

* LOCATIONS...THE ARROWHEAD...INCLUDING TWO HARBORS...SILVER BAY...ISABELLA...LUTSEN...GRAND MARAIS AND GRAND PORTAGE.

* TIMING...THE BEST CHANCE FOR SNOW WILL OCCUR LATE TUESDAY NIGHT INTO WEDNESDAY NIGHT.

* SNOW ACCUMULATIONS...SNOWFALL OF 6 INCHES OR MORE WILL BE POSSIBLE.

* VISIBILITIES...EXPECT VISIBILITIES TO DROP TO A HALF TO QUARTER MILE IN BOTH SNOW AND FOG.

* IMPACTS...THE SNOW WILL CAUSE SLICK ROADS AND HAZARDOUS TRAVEL.

March reality check: wet and colder

Here's an updated look at the wet, then colder reminder that your calendar still says March and your address still says Minnesota.

Tuesday's April-like rain and thunder gives way to a colder forecast this week.

March rain increasing?

A typical March in Minnesota features one more snow emergency as the usual tournament snow storm arrives. It's true weather fans, March is still the third snowiest month on average in the Twin Cities.

You still hear occasional erroneous reports that March is the snowiest month of the year in the metro. March used to be No. 1, but the latest set of 30 year averages bumped March into the No. 3 spot behind January and December.

Lately March in the metro has delivered 10.3 inches of heavy wet snow on average.

Less winter snow, more rain

It's also true that more of our precipitation in the historically wintry months in Minnesota is falling as rain or ice instead of snow. Winter season rainfall has increased three-fold by some measures. That's common sense in the fastest warming state in winter in the U.S.

Is more winter rain a symptom of a rapidly warming winter climate? As the Magic 8-Ball would say: Signs Point To Yes.

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March soaker?

With frozen ground in winter in Minnesota, rainfall usually puddles and freezes once again. That's why it's rare to have a March rainfall soak into soils. Frost is gone from soils in the Twin Cities and most of southern Minnesota. Soil temperature have warmed into the 40s at depth, with near surface soil temps in the 50s, 60s and even 70s in the past week.

Disappearing frost in early March is rare, but may become more common as climate shifts continue to eat away at winter in Minnesota.

Climate Shock: 5th straight hottest month on record globally

February global temperature numbers stunned many climate watchers. It's not just that February was the fifth straight most anomalously hot month globally. The sheer magnitude of the record blew away the previous record in January. 2016 now has a clear head start in potentially surpassing 2015 as the next warmest year of record globally.

Here's a sobering write-up from Jeff Masters and Bob Henson at Weather Underground.

On Saturday, NASA dropped a bombshell of a climate report. February 2016 has soared past all rivals as the warmest seasonally adjusted month in more than a century of global recordkeeping. NASA’s analysis showed that February ran 1.35°C (2.43°F) above the 1951-1980 global average for the month, as can be seen in the list ofmonthly anomalies going back to 1880. The previous record was set just last month, as January 2016 came in 1.14°C above the 1951-1980 average for the month.

In other words, February has dispensed with this one-month-old record by a full 0.21°C (0.38°F)--an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by. Perhaps even more remarkable is that February 2015 crushed the previous February record--set in 1998 during the peak atmospheric influence of the 1997-98 “super” El Niño that’s comparable in strength to the current one--by a massive 0.47°C (0.85°F).

The Guardian weighs in on how the unprecedented magnitude of the temperature spike in the past few months has climate scientists alarmed.

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The unprecedented leap led scientists, usually wary of highlighting a single month’s temperature, to label the new record a “shocker” and warn of a “climate emergency”.

The Nasa data shows the average global surface temperature in February was 1.35C warmer than the average temperature for the month between 1951-1980, a far bigger margin than ever seen before. The previous record, set just one month earlier in January, was 1.15C above the long-term average for that month.

“Nasa dropped a bombshell of a climate report,” said Jeff Masters and Bob Henson, who analysed the data on the Weather Underground website. “February dispensed with the one-month-old record by a full 0.21C – an extraordinary margin to beat a monthly world temperature record by.”

“This result is a true shocker, and yet another reminder of the incessant long-term rise in global temperature resulting from human-produced greenhouse gases,” said Masters and Henson. “We are now hurtling at a frightening pace toward the globally agreed maximum of 2C warming over pre-industrial levels.”

Media Matters on Climate Cast

You would think that since 2015 was arguably the most newsworthy year in climate change history it would warrant more network TV coverage. Here's a snippet of my Friday MPR Climate Cast discussion with Don Shelby that got picked up nationally by Media Matters.

PAUL HUTTNER (HOST): Welcome back everybody, I'm MPR News chief meteorologist Paul Huttner. 2015, right? Perhaps the most newsworthy year for climate change in history. It was the second consecutive hottest year on record globally. In fact, I heard from Michael Mann last night, prominent climate scientist, that last year was probably the warmest year in 1, 300 years for planet earth. It was also a record tropical cyclone year in the Northern Hemisphere, and we watched of course the historic climate agreements at the COP 21 meetings in Paris. So you'd think it would be all over the news, right? Well not exactly, a new study from Media Matters out this week says climate change coverage actually fell on network TV newscasts last year. One example, ABC News, did a total of just 13 minutes of climate change coverage last year, and they interviewed precisely zero climate scientists on the network evening newscasts, according to the study.