Meteorologists are not giving much credence to what some say is the Mayan calendar’s prediction that the world will come to an end on Dec. 21.
They say the strange weather patterns South Texas and the rest of the United States have been experiencing have no connection to the Mayan calendar and what some are calling its doomsday message.
“That has nothing to do with the weather. I think on Dec. 22 we will all wake up that day and get ready for Christmas,” said Barry Goldsmith, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Brownsville.
The Mayan civilization, which reached its height from 300 A.D. to 900 A.D., had a talent for astronomy, the Associated Press reported.
Its Long Count calendar begins in 3,114 B.C., marking time in roughly 394-year periods known as Baktuns. Thirteen was a significant, sacred number for the Mayas, and they wrote that the 13th Baktun ends on Dec. 21, 2012, the AP reported. While some say the calendar predicts a cataclysmic event, others say that is a misinterpretation of the calendar.
A series of freak hailstorms in the Rio Grande Valley over the past few weeks and unusually warm temperatures are attributed to changing weather patterns and not much more, officials said.
“The reality is that sometimes it is just serendipity, the way the puzzle pieces come together in the atmosphere just right to give us an opportunity. I think the reason people get freaked out is that we don’t see it very often here,” Goldsmith said.
Unusual weather patterns have occurred across the nation during the first four months of the year, from dozens and dozens of tornado outbreaks in months that do not usually experience such a high amount, to unusually warm weather on the East Coast that brought temperatures near 90 degrees to the Boston area.
Goldsmith said the only way to put a finger on the weather is to look at the past decades to see if there appear to be any trends. It probably will not be until 2020 or 2030 that meteorologists can determine whether any trends are actually occurring.
“We have had some interesting years lately, but it hasn’t been enough to make a determination,” he said.
If you look at history, you will see that it shows there have been big tornadoes, big hailstorms and big snow storms, but it is probably because there are more people now seeing and videotaping the incidents that it seems like more of these weather events are occurring, Goldsmith said.
Officials are looking into the possibility that the changing weather patterns have something to do with the Arctic Oscillation changes, which have been increasing since the 1980s.
According to OSS Foundation, the Arctic Oscillation is a large scale mode of climate variability, which is characterized by winds circulating counterclockwise around the Arctic at around 55°N latitude.
“They are looking into that as a possible trend” with the weather shifting back and forth, he said.
“If that trend continues, basically we think that meteorologically the extremes will continue because these high oscillation patterns have been shown to correlate to extreme weather,” Goldsmith said.
According to the AP, the doomsday theories stem from a pair of tablets discovered in the 1960s at the archaeological site of Tortuguero in the Gulf of Mexico state of Tabasco that describe the return of a Mayan god at the end of a 13th period.
"The Maya are viewed by many westerners as exotic folks that were supposed to have had some special, secret knowledge," said Maya scholar Sven Gronemeyer in a previous AP article. "What happens is that our expectations and fears get projected on the Maya calendar."
Gronemeyer of La Trobe University in Australia compares the supposed Mayan prophecies to the "Y2K" hype, when people feared all computer systems would crash when the new millennium began on Jan. 1, 2000.
“I don’t think it has to do with the Mayan calendar. I don’t think we are sacrificial lamb,” said Dan Kottlowski, an expert senior meteorologist with AccuWeather.
“We watch the weather all over the world, especially in the United States and Texas, the thing is we see a lot of weird weather every day. Some of it makes the news and some of it doesn’t,” he said. Kottlowski said the weather pattern the area is currently experiencing is something that is normally experienced during the spring.
What makes this year’s weather somewhat “unique” is that there has been more of a southeasterly wind flow from Mexico to South Texas. Usually, the winds are either light or coming from the west of the area, Kottlowski said.
“When you have a large contrast between very warm weather and still the potential for cold weather to interact with that, you are going to see some very unusual situations setting up,” Kottlowski said.
“What I find in meteorology is that people have short memories. They forget that we’ve had these events before,” he said.
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