What is going on!? Early snow melt in Rexburg, Idaho

I live in Rexburg, Idaho.  For anyone who has lived here, gone to school here, or maybe even just visited, the word Rexburg often elicits a bodily chill.  OK, it can be a very cold place.  For example, the record cold temperature for Rexburg for the month of February is -36oF.  The average monthly high temp is 33oF and the average low is 16oF (for the month of February).

So what?

This is the sight that greeted me as I walked home from work yesterday around 5pm.  This is a full-blown snow melt.  The gutter was completely full.  OK, this in and of itself is no big deal.

Rexburg, Idaho, 5:15pm on February 12, 2014

We can have occasional warm days, even warm enough to cause a melt like this, but the thing that really blew me away was what I saw this morning...

...around 7:30am I reversed my path and headed back to work, and this is what I saw (see below).  My phone showed a temperature of 36oF and the gutter was STILL full of snow run off.  This is very, very, very strange.  To have a warm day and melt some snow during the day in Rexburg is no big deal, but to have overnight temperatures that do not drop below freezing and to see snow melt all night long in mid-Feb is strange, strange, strange.  Did I mention that this is strange?

Rexburg, Idaho, 7:30am on February 13, 2014

Was this one-day event caused by global climate change?  No, it's virtually impossible to link a specific one-day weather event like this one directly to climate change.  But, what you can say with a high degree of confidence is that the current global trend of warming makes weather events like this one more likely to happen.

Stay tuned, life is interesting.