Posts Tagged ‘weird weather’
Freaky Swing
We are living it. Is there some way to fully comprehend ‘crazy’ when we are smack dab in the middle of it? The weather drama of well-predicted impacts from a warmer climate keeps playing out right before our very eyes.
I recently watched two movies about real events that happened in my lifetime. The first was a documentary about the disastrous last flight of the space shuttle Challenger and the second was an actor-depicted retelling of the GameStop stock adventures that happened during the pandemic.
When I see these kinds of movies, I struggle to recapture my perceptions of the events at the time they were playing out. It all comes up rather blurry in my mind compared to the clear and orderly hindsight offered in such films.
If someone eventually makes a movie in the future depicting all the series of weird weather, fires, flooding, and souped-up storms we have been experiencing, will it come across as more explicitly obvious than how we perceive it now? It should.
I suspect it will make us all look bad for how slow or ultimately ineffective we were in reducing carbon emissions.
On Tuesday, it warmed to 53°F by afternoon, and then clouds rolled in bringing snow, gale-force winds, and a drop in temperature to a mere 4°F by yesterday morning.
The average high for the Twin Cities is 35 for the coming weekend. We are expecting temperatures in the 50s and 60s. What a whiplash.
The horses didn’t seem overly ruffled by the extreme temperature swing overnight Tuesday. By the time Asher and I showed up at the barn in the morning yesterday, the wild winds that made eerie sounds all night long had calmed significantly.
The surface of the driveway had a wicked glaze over it. The truck delivering bags of feed almost didn’t make the corner when turning into our driveway. Luckily, she stopped before sliding all the way off the pavement.
By noon, the bright sunshine had cleared off most of the asphalt surface.
Today is the occasion of Leap Day. February has been so unusual weather-wise, the ‘every-4-years’ addition of one day hardly seems worth mentioning.
Not that I’d notice it happened if you showed me a movie about it three years from now.
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Insects Airborne
On January 31st, 2024, the temperature in our area was roughly mid-fifties (F) by mid-afternoon. That was record-breaking for the 150 years people have been keeping track. Our winter is broken.
Coming up from the barn after feeding horses, I came upon a cloud of insects flying in an odd-looking up-and-down loop.
I recorded a short video that you can see on YouTube by clicking on this image:
I’m no Entomologist, but I suspect they may have just recently hatched and this circular exercise is related to them figuring out how their wings work and allowing them to establish their bearings before setting off in the world. It appears they have grasped the concept of which way up is.
In light conversation with staff at the eye clinic, I noticed a common thought that there is a high chance we will end up paying for this in March or April in the form of a massive dump of snow all at once. Sure, this is mighty comfortable now, but nothing good is consequence-free.
I haven’t been having that same feeling. They may well be right but I’m a bit more worried that we might not get any more winter weather and slam right into an accelerated heat up and early spring that will confuse all manner of flora and fauna. I would be happy to be wrong on that.
Happy February, everyone.
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Global Weirding
The warming of planet Earth does not necessarily mean everywhere just gets warmer all the time, but unusual warmth does tend to happen with increasing frequency.
In our region, the middle of November is not usually a time when we would see someone out mowing their grass. On Tuesday, that is exactly what we saw. November is also not a time most of us associate with dandelion blossoms, but that is what’s showing up in our yard.
It was mid-60sF warm around here yesterday and once again mind-bending for the glimpses of spring-like blossoms showing up at the same time that the woods look like the farthest thing possible away from spring.
It all seems just plain weird. It’s gotten hard to remember we’ve already been completely blanketed by snow for a time earlier this month. That’s become a distant memory now.
The weather forecast for next week hints that it won’t continue to be weird with temperatures predicted to drop into the mid-teens(F) over a few nights in a row.
That will feel downright Thanksgiving-ish.
Between periods of weirdness, it makes sense that we experience a little normalcy every once in a while.
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Perfect Balance
If we have to endure so much snow in October, at least we benefited yesterday from a temperature that was the perfect balance for gorgeous falling snow without the need to plow or shovel. The ground isn’t frozen yet and the rate of falling flakes was not high enough to overwhelm the residual warmth in the asphalt of our driveway.
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It was snowing from the moment we woke up until very late in the afternoon but I didn’t need to lift a shovel.
I’m soaking up the pleasure of that to the fullest, knowing the feature won’t last.
This morning the temperature was down to 22°(F), well below freezing. The average for October is a high of 58 and low of 40. Of course, this is the year 2020, so, the word “average” doesn’t apply in the least.
These conditions are more in line with our December weather averages than October. We’re only about a month and a half out of whack.
Sing along with me… “It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas…”
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Melty Mess
Two days of consecutive hours above freezing have turned our snow cover to a goopy mess. It’s a real mental challenge to reconcile the dramatic difference between the polar vortex deep freeze last week and the balmy meltdown that occurred over the weekend.
This is how the surface of the snow looks now:
It’s a lot more like April than a day in February.
On the bright side, we haven’t had a single snowmobile buzzing down the trail that runs along our neighbor’s property on our southern border this year. Makes for a much more serene outdoor experience, despite all the other hazards we’ve faced.
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More Weather
Weather was the center of attention on the ranch again yesterday afternoon. During my hour drive home from work, I heard the announcement that our county was included in a tornado watch until 11:00 p.m. I checked the radar when I got home and found there was nothing to indicate a storm was imminent.
During the short time I was catching up on my daily reading on a handful of web sites, the radar screen rapidly changed from nothing of interest to “better take cover soon!”
That came up really fast. In the image, there is a marker indicating our home, southeast of River Falls. I figured there was plenty of time before the main event would get here, so I stepped outside to see what it looked like in real life.
The change in atmosphere from when I left the workplace to when I walked out the door to look at the sky was remarkable. The dew point temperature had soared to a tropical 70° (F). The air temperature was in the high 70s.
I don’t know how much the sudden return of warmth might have contributed, but yesterday also happened to mark the return of our annual Asian beetle infestation. It is striking how specifically the environment changes in a single day, going from nothing at all, to thousands of bugs swarming all at once.
Somewhere nearby, a soybean crop has been harvested from the field, triggering the mass migration of beetles to some source of water and shelter.
Getting out in the air provided a feeling that there was more than enough fuel for a rip-roaring thunderstorm, but the reality I encountered didn’t look bad at all yet.
It was actually a serene scene of calm horses in front of a backdrop of fall colors in the trees. Low clouds were sweeping by at a pretty good clip, mostly obscuring the higher and darker wall of the approaching storm.
A short while later, while we were eating dinner, the sky opened up to dump an inch of rain in a relatively short-lived outburst. Oddly, there was little in the way of lightning and thunder. Maybe it was moving by too fast. The sky turned a little green, but that was probably more a function of the low angle of the setting sun than it was the measure of threat from the storm.
It didn’t even blow that hard during the peak. That actually came later. Once the storm had passed, the sky cleared, stars shined bright, and strong gusting winds blew in to fill the void.
It was just another day where the weather served up the equivalence of several days of action –or several seasons even– all in a single afternoon.
We measure that in WPMs around here. That is, Weather Per Minute.
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Relative Something 