Over on WUWT there is a very good article about how most all of the USA has snow on it. I’ll just point to that article as it has plenty of nice snow maps in it already.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/01/11/nearly-70-of-the-usa-is-covered-in-snow/
like this one:
USA Snow Cover 11 Jan 2011
But here I’m going to add a Freeze Level map. It’s pretty clear that the whole place is frozen until you reach somewhere near the water…
US Freezing Level 11 Jan 2011
Here is the current map so you can watch things change:
Current Feeze Levels in The USA
Musings from the Chiefio 
No wonder people would rather be hot than cold. Doesn’t water freeze at 32F and boil at 200+ (at sea level), and aren’t we 99.999% water? (more or less)
I still can’t understand what the problem is with Global Warming. Didn’t dinosaurs have a long life when things were hot? (Of course anyone would get exterminated if a rock the size of Manhatten hit the soup.)
Thanks for posting the maps!
Where’s Al Gore?
OLiver K. Manuel
@Oliver K. Manuel:
In Hiding. ;-)
@Pascvaks:
If you want to know the optimal temperature for life, it’s pretty easy to work out. Look at the body temperature of mammals and look at the environmental temperature that reptiles like best and then look at where you get the best crop growth. It’s about 90 F to 105 F give or take a couple.
Even some cool tolerant plants don’t do well (or flat out shut down) when you drop below about 50 F. Tomatoes (a warm crop) will not set fruit, for example, and many cold tolerant plants will not sprout seeds below about 50 F (and do so more slowly below about 70 F in any case).
So “life” pretty much votes for something between “room temperature” and 100 F as ‘ideal”. And that is where folks run greenhouses and chicken coops and…
Once you hit the freeze line and have “first frost” it’s the rare plant that keeps on being productive. Yes, many will ‘survive’, but they don’t put on a lot of added growth…
Surviving is not thriving.
I’ll take ‘warm and thriving’ please…
I left a comment on WUWT about where I live. See that green spot on the east coast?
If it is going to be cold, it SHOULD snow!
Interesting thoughts about snowfall in NYC and the people who are trying to link it with AGW.
http://www.masterresource.org/2011/01/more-big-new-york-city-snowstorms/
That doesn’t seem unusual. The same people that were saying that it would never flood in Brisbane again because of “global warming” are today saying that it is flooding due to “global warming”.
It doesn’t matter what it is … someone left the seat up in the bathroom? Global warming! Get a bunion? Global warming! It causes everything!
It’s just plain nuts.
So why isn’t this enough of an albedo change to tip us into an ice age? I still don’t think albedo has any more effect on “global temperature” than CO2.
On the snow map, I’m in that leeetle strip of green in Western Washington, north of Seattle. We had some snow on the ground until yesterday evening. Since then it’s rained and warmed up to about 45f, so now it’s just soggy.
@Jeff Alberts:
It’s not the winter Albedo that matters, it’s the summer melt.
That was the key bit that Milankovitch figured out.
It’s always snowy and frozen at the South Pole, so it doesn’t matter to the event.
It’s always snowy and frozen at the North Pole in winter so that doesn’t matter to the event.
During the summer, at the north pole, under just the right combination of polar tilt, orbital roundness, and precession (so “june” is happening when closest to the sun) we can just barely melt the North Polar Ice Cap. That gives an “interglacial” and the world is happy.
So winter snow albedo? Doesn’t matter at all.
That we started leaving behind that “tilt, orbit, precession” set about 6000 years ago and have been moving steadily more to the cold side ever since… THAT matters…
The the Green Loons want the polar ice to stay “multi year” through the summer is ‘crazy talk’ as they have no clue what that means…
So: Enjoy your slush… consider the alternative…