…generally don’t.
We have snowplows. We have coats. We’re ready for this stuff.
Our sky is grey and the trees are leafless and the place is constantly sodden with condensation that should be frozen. Glug.
On a brighter note, the Dragon Speech thing is working well. I’m really happy with it.
It’s 11:18 our time and I have 2 cats perched on the bureau between me and the telly, reminding me that if I do not feed them soon they will consider other options.
We had something like 5 inches or so on the ground when I went to bed on Friday night. By Saturday, the snow was coming down thick, and the winds were blowing pretty hard, so there were plenty of drifts. Saturday night, we got more snow beginning after midnight, and ending around 10:30 this morning (Sunday). There have been a slew of accidents here in town, fortunately, none fatal, not like the pileup in Indiana the other day. One of my friends had his van hit while his daughter was stuck in a backup on the interstate, she’d pulled off to the shoulder, and a pickup truck driver who was apparently not paying attention hit the brakes suddenly, and skidded over into the rear end of their van. They were unhurt, but that’s still stupidity for a driver on the interstate to be inattentive. Must have been an important text he was sending.
I went out with the snow thrower this morning after it stopped snowing, got the neighbors’ driveways done, the city hasn’t bothered to send snowplows through on the side streets, apparently because more snow is on the way, so why bother? Wait until the temperatures dip down to the negative digits, then shove it all into peoples’ driveways so they can’t dig the ice piles out enough to get their cars out of their driveways. My city doesn’t plow unless there’s more than 2 inches of snow on the streets. I guess the resulting glare ice from traffic compacting the snow makes for more excitement.
KI was just reading about the storm that’s moving into the Southeast. Snow and freezing rain in a band – relatively narrow – arcing from Wilmington, NC, south to central Georgia and southwest to Houston. In Alabama they’re warning about 1/2 to 3/4 inch of ice on everything.
I’ve got more snow just to the west, and behind that: the big mass of arctic air that’s going to drive our overnight temperature to about 4 F, and tomorrow night, down to -15 F (that’s air temperature without the wind chill factor that’s predicted to be around -39 F). I hope people around here have taken their pets indoors, or provided them some adequate shelter from hypothermia and frostbite. People think that just because they have fur, animals can survive this kind of weather. They don’t realize that a dog chained to a stake in a yard can’t move very far and can’t necessarily get out of the wind or rain.
We’re having a winter like that, here in Holland: much too mild, more like fall than winter. No snow yet, and nothing but a very few little night-frosts, in what should be the deepest part of winter. Now we don’t usually get a lot of deep snow or frost (it’s a temperate coastal climate), but this is so unseasonably warm that there are birds building nests and starting on their spring warbling, while some of the autumn-flowering plants are still showing a few blooms, and the bulbs are showing green sprouts – and not just the snowdrops, but crocus and daffodils too.
We even had a hayfever alert at Christmas, because the alder trees were flowering profusely!
I find the mechanisms behind these changes very interesting. I’m not a weather-person, so if anybody knows more please correct me, but this is what I’ve read about it.
The slowing and meandering jetstream that should be whizzing round the North Pole seems to be to blame for disrupting the weather patterns all over the northern hemisphere. It seems the warmer arctic is robbing it of energy, causing the meanders to deepen and stay in one place a lot longer than usual, meaning that where such an arm reaches farther south than usual the polar cold can get deep into southern states that aren’t used to it, and in between those deeper-south-reaching arms, an unseasonal northwards flow of warm air can keep away the usual winter cold, or cause extreme heatwaves in summer in places that aren’t used to that kind of prolonged heat.
It also means the steady progression of winter storms alternating with cold dry air, that’s such a staple of our winter weather, gets blocked by the unmoving arms of the jet-stream. Normally, I’m told, that should be a sort of short-armed starfish-shaped flow that rotates around the north pole, driven by the temperature differential between arctic and mid-latitudes – when the air in the outline of the starfish-arms is flowing fast and tight, it keeps the whole shape rotating as well, so no weather system stuck between those arms stays over one spot for long (leading to our usual winter 2-week cycle of storms and cold clear air).
Now the arctic is warming up in comparison with the lower latitudes, the airflow has less energy and speed; and like a slowing river the meanders deepen and have less push that could drive the arm as a whole forward, so the arms of the starfish get longer and reach deeper to the south, while moving much slower (or sometimes hardly at all) from west to east.
So a storm that sits between two arms gets stuck in one place, causing downpours and flooding there, and leaving the other parts of the country/continent dry and subject to droughts.
And all that because global warming is hitting the arctic hardest, unbalancing the system.
Interesting. Europe is getting some info I wish our be-happy, what, me worry? weathermen would deliver to us. Very interesting! Now, if the weather melts the immense ice-load on Katla, (the volcano in Iceland)—we may see a condition to refrost the arctic.
If you can find a book called…Planetary Atmospheres—in paperback the thing is 42 dollars!—this study is fascinating. People who bicker back and forth about global warming really should give a read to this compendium on what we’ve learned from other worlds…
I had a convention dinner with a German, now living in England, who made conversation by posing riddles. One was, you put a refrigerator in a room, open its doors, and plug it in. Does the room get cooler, warmer, or stay the same?
But let’s consider normal use of a refrigerator. You turn it on low, the freezer gets cold, and the room gets warm–because the refrigerator pumps heat from the freezer to the room. Now, lets turn it up. It has more energy, just as a warmed Earth has more energy. The heat pump pumps harder so the freezer gets still colder and the room still warmer. While more energy leads to more heat in the room, it also leads to a still colder freezer. But the average temperature of everything, freezer and room, is higher. So, extreme cold during global warmth is entirely consistent.
The problem (tap dancing so the answer to the riddle above won’t be easy to spot) is the wretched state of US science literacy. I went to get some light bulbs for floodlights that just weren’t putting out enough light. The fixtures are only rated at 75W, and on an old dimmer, so LEDs and CFLs were out. I got some 65W “100W equivalent” halogens. The clerk was concerned about the 100W equivalent bit. Well, the bulbs cannot use more than the 65W actual power going into them, can they? And all that converts to heat, and light that hits things and heats them up. So in the riddle, the heat pump is spinning its wheels pumping heat out of the refrigerator which just flows back in through the open door(s). But the heat pump is using energy; that energy can’t be lost; so the room gets warmer. Conservation of energy or the three laws of thermodynamics, as you choose. That the riddle is even a riddle says something about the state of science education.
“Were you there when the pharaoh commissioned the Sphinx?”
Were you there when Chinese invented paper and inks?
Apparently: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131216154858.htm
Domesticated cats from roughly 3300 BC have been found in China. (Along with domesticated pigs and dogs–companions or food on feet?) The question is whether these cats are descended from African cats or whether multiple species might have been domesticated. Only DNA will tell. Since the human-cat relationship is beneficial for both and gradual–cats hunting where the rats are, near agriculture–domestication of multiple species seems entirely possible.
It sounds like you’ve got out weather and we’ve got yours. My sister used to call it “typical Atlanta yuck.”
Down here on the southern Oregon coast, and down into California, its getting scary. We’re close to 30 inches below our normal rainfall for the season (October to May). The rivers look like its mid summer, and unless we get some steady rain between now and May that builds some snowpack up in the mountains, we’re going to be in a WORLD of hurt come summer.
There is apparently a ‘Ridiculously Resilient Ridge’ of high pressure off the southern CA coast that is pushing our normal rain north. Its been hanging out there over a year messing with our weather. So, instead of falling on THIS side of the Rockies, the eastern US is getting blizzards.
On the other hand, its been a gloriously beautiful winter, lots of sun and nice days, even a couple weeks in the 60s!
Here on the south end of the mountains, I think I remember what rain is.
@weeble: From what I’ve often heard, the circumpolar jet stream (in the layer just above where our weather forms) has a lot of influence on the high- and low-pressure systems in the weather layer just underneath. Your Ridiculously Resilient Ridge may owe some of i’s stubbornness to that.
@WOL: The polar vortex is much, much higher up – it’s not something I’ve read much about as it isn’t causing trouble in Europe; but the little I’ve heard was rather doubtful about that being a direct cause of the unseasonal cold in a lot of the USA – the one weatherperson I heard give an explanation about this said it was closely correlated with the way the jetstream was moving, and said there is so little exchange between the near stratospheric (IIRC) layer of the atmosphere where the polar vortex is located, and the lowest layer where our weather sits, that direct causation seemed unlikely to him. He seemed rather dismissive of the way the US news portrays the cause of the unseasonal weather to the US public, though not overtly scornful; I just got the impression he didn’t think the US public gets any real scientific explanation of the weather on their news, just snap ‘soundbite’ style “give it a mediagenic name preferably with a colourful chart to go with it, and then using the name means we’ve given an explanation” sort of non-explanations, though maybe I’m overcharging this.
On the other hand, some scientists have come up with a way in which the jetstreamlayer and the higher-up polar vortex layer could interact through the intervening layer – I saw one article about that, but have forgotten the details – so maybe the polar vortex does have a indirect influence, or maybe the jetstream is influencing both.
When Don Henley sang the song, “Dirty Laundry” about news broadcasters, there was a line that still strikes me. “I just have to look good, I don’t have to be clear.” They also don’t have to know what they’re talking about, either, which is why I take most newscasts with a grain of salt.
You of course realize that those levees along the major rivers had better be strong this spring — once all that Midwest snow starts to melt, we are going to get flooding that will have communities everywhere looking for Noah’s Ark. Too bad there’s not a good way to ship all that snow to places that are currently shy of water. Just dump it in any convenient reservoir.
If the spring thaw is quick, I’m afraid you’re very, very right, chordrite.
Maybe we need a transcontinental water pipeline?
I’m not so scared about drought as I am about fires. California would love a nice polar vortex before Summer.
The southwestern states at one point proposed a pipeline to suck water from the Great Lakes and pipe it to SoCal, Arizona and New Mexico, among other places. The Great Lakes states said “Oh no you don’t either!!” and vetoed the idea with great prejudice. Maybe it would be a good idea to revisit the idea, not necessarily siphoning from the Great Lakes, but from the headwaters and several other points of the Missouri and Mississippi, especially during flood seasons. The problem, as usual, is getting the surplus to a place that can use it. This sounds like a great public works project.
I remember reading about a very large controversy where California was going to claim all of the water from the Colorado River south of a certain point, possibly Hoover Dam, to “feed” Los Angeles. Only humans would vastly overpopulate an area that is largely desert, and then claim that they have a right to suck water out of every source available, whether it’s in California or not. IIRC, it went to court, and the states through which the Colorado flows, or border it, were awarded a percentage of the total water, but California still gets the bigger percentage. How much water from Lake Mead goes to Los Angeles, not to mention the electricity generated, and then there are all of the other aqueducts, including the one that’s draining Mono Lake for Los Angeles. There are times when I wish people would have used their heads.
And for just such a reason, the Rio Grande ain’t so ‘grande’ any more.
Still as long. 😉
It’s a federal agreement, actually, because there are several states plus Mexico involved.
LA isn’t going to get water from Mono Lake because it isn’t drinkable in any way.
People still keep proposing it. I suspect they don’t understand how much water would need to be moved, and how large a pipeline it would be. (It would also take years to get built, assuming it’s even possible.)
Maybe if we promised to reverse the flow in Winter and pump warm air to them? Still, DC is a much closer source of hot air….
It’s supposed to get down to a low 8 F/-13 C here tonight. I live at the same latitude as Casablanca, Morocco, BTW (although we have a lot more latitude than they do). I wish Canada would keep its cotton-picking polar vortices to itself.
You forgot about the Midwest. We’ve had a tough winter, but notes bad as in the late ’70s and early ’80s/ I keep telling myself that.Still, we do more than hold the coasts apart.
I’ve long thought we could make a deal and dig a monster lake in Nebraska: pump it full during the spring melt that is so troublesome on the Red River (northern one), then slowly pump it dry again during the summers.
It would benefit the spring bird migrations; it would benefit the people up there who get flooded annually, and it would certainly benefit the Ogalala Aquifer, which farmers south of there are busily pumping dry.
That’s what all the “bottom land” was about, before the Army Corps of Engineers channelized the Mississip.
A big mistake. A big one.
The Corps isn’t always right. We had a big fight with them running a project through our land in Oklahoma—they had a regulation that said, for flood control, cut down all trees within so-many-feet of a waterway.
Bullshit! Not in the Oklahoma, Texas, Kansas softlands, where it’s 40 feet of red clay and sand under that surface. Trees grow ONLY along riverbanks and help pin the rivers and streams WITHIN their banks, so they don’t whiplash like wounded snakes across the landscape.
They left the project. Locals ended up with a bill, but at least without their neighboring fields ruined.
Some of these folk also wanted to drop dredge dirt onto one of our fields. No. Fields will grow things. Dredge dirt off a softlands creek bottom won’t. We worked for generations to get biomass into that field. THe Corp image of the fertile Nile bestowing the volcanic soil of central Africa upon Egyptian fields don’t apply worth beans to Tonkawa Creek in Oklahoma.
They still like to do that, where they can get away with it. They bulldozed part of the wildlife area at Sepulveda, claiming it was to protect native plants – but most of what they bulldozed WAS native plants, and they hadn’t bothered to go through all the hearings that were supposed to be held.
Walt: the problem is that with incandescant bulbs, the wattage denotes both the lumen output and power (volts*amps) consumed, and the usages are (for Americans) still interchangeable. Wattage limits on fixtures may consist either of the heat buildup inside and enclosed shell that can be tolerated, or the current-carrying capacity of the wiring, or some combination of the two. From a strictly electrical standpoint, the 65W halogen will be fine in a 75W socket. From a heat-buildup standpoint, it might NOT be. Keep in mind halogens run hotter than regular incandescants, on a watt-per-watt basis! You might melt (or cook, or otherwise break down) insulation in the wiring or in the socket itself (think cardboard sleeves in desk lamp sockets), and develop a hard short. MUCH depends on the physical design of the lamp and bulb enclosure. As a side note, there ARE dimmable LEDS available; they are typically more expensive, but given that they consume 3-6 VA for lumen output equivalent to 40-60W incandescent, they will pay for themselves sooner or later — if you can get past the initial outlay (up to $30/bulb!). I got lucky, picked up a couple dimmables on sale for $11…