Sunshine and 70 ahead; 10th ‘least miserable’ winter

It's about time.

Even in mild winters in Minnesota, we earn our springs in Minnesota.

This year we skated by with the 10th "least miserable" winter on record according to Pete Boulay and the outstanding staff at the Minnesota Climatology Working Group.

Now we watch the first real warm front of spring push north this week. This warm surge may stick around for a while.

Underneath the warm front, sunshine, southerly winds and warm advection push thermometers toward the 70 degree mark as soon as Thursday. I won't be shocked to see an 80 degree temp in western Minnesota late this week.

University of Maine's Climate Reanalyzer shows the warm bubble with temperature a good 15 degrees warmer than average from the Upper Midwest to Hudson Bay by Friday.

Here's a more detailed breakdown for the Twin Cities. Plan your leisurely stroll around the lakes accordingly.

Mild April finish?

Our chilly start to April is about to reverse course. So far April is running -5.8 degrees vs. average at Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.

Our incoming milder than average air could stick around through the end of the month. Upper air charts are a good broad brush gauge for the type of air masses we can expect going forward. A westerly flow with the jet stream way up in Canada means milder than average air for Minnesota.

NOAA's Global Forecast System model 16-day forecast output for MSP continues to favor above average temperatures and below average rainfall overall. The majority of days in the 60s and 70s should jump start spring's green wave in a big way.

No more metro frost through April 28? We'll see.

NOAA's Climate Predication Center sees the trend for warmer than average temps over much of the United States the last week of April.

Dry around the edges

Rain looks infrequent. The best chance for a good soaking arrives next Monday and Tuesday according to the European model. We could use it in the metro. The European model is more optimistic than NOAA's GFS about rainfall totals next week.

Dryness is starting to creep into the Dakotas and western Minnesota on the U.S. Drought Monitor

Wet weather over the central U.S. looks well placed to alleviate some of the dryness on NOAA's seven-day rainfall output.

Record early melt underway in Greenland

This is mildly alarming. The melt season in Greenland is already underway. That's unprecedented for April, and pacing nearly two months ahead of average.

Climate Central's Brian Kahn elaborates.

To say the 2016 Greenland melt season is off to the races is an understatement.

Warm, wet conditions rapidly kicked off the melt season this weekend, more than a month-and-a-half ahead of schedule. It has easily set a record for earliest melt season onset, and marks the first time it’s begun in April.

Little to no melt through winter is the norm as sub-zero temperatures keep Greenland’s massive ice sheet, well, on ice. Warm weather usually kicks off the melt season in late May or early June, but this year is a bit different.

Record warm temperatures coupled with heavy rain mostly sparked 12 percent of the ice sheet to go into meltdown mode (hat tip to Climate Home's Megan Darby). Almost all the melt is currently centered around southwest Greenland.

According to Polar Portal, which monitors all things ice-related in the Arctic, melt season kicks off when 10 percent of the ice sheet experiences surface melt. The previous record for earliest start was May 5, 2010.

This April kickoff is so bizarrely early, scientists who study the ice sheet checked their analysis to make sure something wasn’t amiss before making the announcement.

“We had to check that our models were still working properly” Peter Langen, a climate scientist at the Denmark Meteorological Institute (DMI), told the Polar Portal.

But alas, the models are definitely working and weather data and stories coming out of West Greenland have borne that out. According to DMI, temperatures at Kangerlussuaq, a small village in southwest Greenland, set an April record for that location when they reached 64.4°F (17.8°C) on Monday. That’s just a scant .4°F (.2°C) off the all-time Greenland high for April. Heavy rain have also inundated local communities.

Stay tuned on this one folks.