Tag Archives: dangerous weather

More Winter

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Kicked off February with a day above freezing. Two observations: The only thing good about February is that January is over. Also, winter hasn’t abated. It’s just lulling us with a temporary moment of ease.

The map below is lifted from the NWS, which of course puts it in the public domain. Looks like we’ll get at least a few inches tomorrow, while the real wintertime action is some distance away. Ann will probably experience some heavy snow. I’m glad that didn’t happen on Sunday. Rather, a bomb cyclone had just hit the Northeast. There’s a term I enjoy: bomb cyclone. But it’s not so much fun to be visited by one.weather map 2/1/22

Train of thought for the day, inspired by a Google doodle. Today’s doodle connects you to an page labeled Lunar Calendar, which is a discussion of that kind of calendar, not the specific Chinese calendar whose new year is always around now in the Georgian calendar. That might give people the idea that all lunar calendars begin around now.

Then again, there are vanishingly few people who care about the subject at all. There aren’t any ardent U.S. calendar factions, such as those pushing for a restoration of the Western lunar calendar, asserting that the pointy-headed solar calendar is just an interloper and Sosigenes of Alexandria was a con man, or communities of Julian calendar users in pockets of Appalachia who quarrel with the federal government every year about when Tax Day is. It’s just a fact that most people’s entire concern with the calendar is what day is it now, and how far in the future is this planned event?

Then again again, I don’t know much myself about the Chinese lunar calendar, except that it’s a lunar calendar, it’s Chinese, and new year comes around the beginning of February. And that each year has one of five elements and 12 animals, making for a cycle of 60 years, though that’s actually an aspect of Chinese astrology, which I hold in exactly the same regard as any other astrology.

What calendar knowledge I have is fairly Gregorian and Julian, and some about liturgical calendars, and a bit about the Jewish and Muslim calendars. So maybe I should learn myself some Chinese calendar facts. The remarkable thing is how easy that would be to do in our time, sitting right here at my desk.

Which can easily become a rabbit hole. When I was reading about calendars today, I found a page about Lunar Calendar and Standard Time, which as far as I can tell was made up by some Swedes because they perceived a lack of standard units of time to be used on the Moon.

Ida

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Grabbed from NASA. Hurricane Ida yesterday, from space.

A forecast map snipped from NOAA.

Looks like some folks I know in Middle Tennessee, and later New York, are going to get major wind and rain soon. Meanwhile, we’ll see some heat and some humidity, as we have these last couple of weeks.

Turns out Atlantic hurricanes beginning with the letter “i” have been particularly vicious over the years. Eleven have been retired so far, a mark of their severity: Ione, Inez, Iris, Isidore, Isabel, Ivan, Ike, Igor, Irene, Ingrid, Irma. No other letter has so many retired names.

Summer Storm

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Yesterday, a quick storm just before dark. Today, the same.

The gathering August 25 storm here in the northwest suburbs, not long before sunset.

The storm breaks.

After about 20 minutes, rain is still falling and the western sky lights up a pastel yellow that my photo hardly conveys.

Ten more minutes, it slacks off, with thunder rumbles continuing and occasional bursts of rain. The bright yellow to the west devolves into gray and then black.

Up to Coldfoot

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Turns out that a lot of information about an airplane is readily available via its registration number, typically found on the fin. If I’d thought about it, I probably would have realized that before, but it isn’t something I ever had much interest in, until I decided to look up the number on this aircraft.

Arctic Air

N3589B tells me that it’s a Piper PA-31 Navajo Chieftain manufactured in 1980 and owned by tour operator Air Arctic since 2007, with 310-horsepower Lycoming TIO-540 engines.

“Stretched version of the Navajo with more powerful 350-hp (261-kW) counter-rotating engines (a Lycoming TIO-540 and a Lycoming LTIO-540) to eliminate critical engine issues,” Wiki says.

Italics mine, since critical engine issues were the last thing I’d have wanted during my flight from Fairbanks to Coldfoot, Alaska (pop. 10), last Tuesday. Of course nothing untoward happened. There wasn’t even that much turbulence.

There was a chance that we might not have made it to Coldfoot, however. Not long before boarding the plane, a tour company employee told us that visibility was poor in Coldfoot, with low clouds and rain. If those conditions persisted, landing in Coldfoot might be impossible, since the place only had a simple airstrip with no instruments. Such are the vagaries of an Alaskan summer.

In that case, our flight would be diverted to Bettles, where an instrument landing would be possible. Bettles (pop. 12), founded during the 1898 Alaska gold rush and currently location of a lodge devoted to Arctic tourism, is also above the Arctic Circle, but not on the Dalton Highway, so we would have to return by air rather than tour bus.

We all said that we understood this was possible, and agreed to proceed.

The pilot was this fellow, Steve. He posed for pictures after the flight with all of the groups on board: a couple, a family of four and me. He has some years on me, which I counted as a good thing. You know what they say about old pilots and bold pilots.

Arctic Air pilot Steve

I sat in the back of the plane. When I called for a reservation about a month earlier, the woman taking my information asked me my weight. I gave as honest answer as I could, considering I don’t weigh myself regularly. I suspect I earned by position in back by being the fattest of the passengers, but I didn’t ask.
flight to Coldfoot, Alaska

That was before we all put on earphones, so we could hear the pilot talking to us, and not hear the roar of the engines. I listened to the engines for a few seconds, and they did roar — too much to put up with for the full hour and ten minutes of the flight.

Off we went.
flight to Coldfoot, Alaska

Because I was by myself in the back, with the seat next to me empty, I could look out of both windows. For a while out of Fairbanks, the view was pretty good. Such as of the expansive Tanana River, south of town.
flight to Coldfoot, Alaska

The pilot mentioned the name of this place, but I’ve forgotten it.
flight to Coldfoot, Alaska

We also had a view of the Alaska Pipeline for a while, but soon everything clouded over, and the views looked like this for a time.
flight to Coldfoot, Alaska

No matter. The thrill was still there. We spent much of the flight at 6,000 or 8,000 feet, above the clouds. Air-traffic control chatter was audible through the earphones, and I could see the altimeter clear enough all the way in the back. Guess that’s something that really needs to be visible. There was a fair amount of air traffic over the Alaskan bush, including a medevac in progress, though I couldn’t make out from where to where. Guess bush planes are the main way to get around this wilderness.

Most of the way into the flight, the pilot pointed to a display on the control panel — that I couldn’t see much from back in the back — that told us we were flying over the Arctic Circle. We were still over cloud cover. “It isn’t like you’d see a line on the ground anyway,” he said.

We flew near Bettles, within sight of the airstrip, in case we needed to land there. But pilot Steve reported good visibility ahead, and the ground at Coldfoot confirmed tolerable weather, so on we went for a landing. The landing strip was wet with recent rain, with temps in the 50s F.

In full, the place is Coldfoot Camp, at Mile 175 on the Dalton Highway, and roughly 55 miles above the Arctic Circle. It too was originally an ephemeral gold rush camp, much later (1970) repurposed as a camp for the construction of the Alaska Pipeline. Later still (as it is now) it’s a truck stop for the traffic on the Dalton, founded by Iditarod champion Dick Mackey. Last gas for 240 miles.

Coldfoot, Alaska

For me, and of interest to no one else, Coldfoot now marks the furthest north I’ve ever been, besting Vyborg, Russia, where we stopped briefly in 1994. Coldfoot is at 67°15′ 5″ N, 150°10′ 34″ W. Actually, the day before, Fairbanks bested Vyborg, but never mind.

Coldfoot is a utilitarian place.Coldfoot, Alaska

Coldfoot, Alaska
Boasting the northernmost bar in the USA, at least according to our guide (not the pilot, but someone also named Steve, who later drove our bus south).
Coldfoot, Alaska

It’s a claim I haven’t checked thoroughly, except to note that it would be unwise to have a bar up near Prudhoe Bay among the oilfield workers, and in fact Deadhorse is a dry town. Barrow (Utqiaġvik) is what the Alaskans call a “damp” town. No alcohol for sale, but you can bring your own. This map seems to confirm Coldfoot’s northernmost-bar status, though it doesn’t seem to be up-to-date about Barrow.

We ate lunch in the barroom, meals we’d ordered back in Fairbanks and which the tour operator faxed to Coldfoot. I had a decent fish sandwich and fries. Elsewhere in the complex was a dining room occupied mostly by truckers, a kitchen, a snack counter and a gift shop, and outbuildings that seemed devoted to truck and aircraft maintenance (Alaska DOT has a facility there). I understand that spartan rooms are available for rent in Coldfoot as well.

One wall included a place for stickers. People come from all over to visit Coldfoot, just like I did. Note that Buc-ee’s is in Alaska, in spirit anyway.
Coldfoot, Alaska

There’s also a post office, adjacent to the main complex, open three days a week — not the day I was there.
Coldfoot, Alaska

Still, the slot is always open, and I dropped in eight cards that I’d written earlier while waiting for the plane: two to Illinois, two to Texas, two to Tennessee and one each to Massachusetts and New York, with the promise they would be picked up the next day. We shall see how long delivery takes.

The Presidents Day Storm: We Called It Monday

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Another Presidents Day come and gone. The aftermath of the Presidents Day Storm of 2021 still lingers, especially down South. (I’d forgotten about the Presidents Day Storm of 2003, probably because it was NE and Mid-Atlantic.)

Around here we merely had more snow pile on top of our increasingly large drifts. About 6 inches in my neck of the suburbs, but other metro Chicago places got two or even three times as much. In any case, it’s accumulating. In some parts of my yard, the snow looks at three feet deep.

Indoors, I marked the day by taping a new postcard to the wall. It depicts FDR.

“During the autumn of 1944, Roosevelt received a letter from artist Douglas Chandor, proposing that a painting be created of Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, to document the allied efforts at the Yalta Conference in Russia,” the Smithsonian says about the painting.

“Chandor arranged a sitting for Roosevelt in early April, less than a month before the president’s passing. This portrait is a study for the larger painting, The Big Three at Yalta — a sketch of which appears at the lower left. Chandor also painted a life portrait of Churchill, which is owned by the National Portrait Gallery, but Stalin would not sit for his portrait. Thus, The Big Three at Yalta was never painted.

“Chandor believed that hands revealed as much of a person’s spirit as his or her face would, and therefore experimented with multiple configurations and gestures, scattered across the bottom of the canvas. Roosevelt, however, was dismayed by the attention Chandor paid to his hands, dismissing them as ‘unremarkable’ and likening them to ‘those of a farmer.’ ”

Interesting hands, but also an idealized face. I’ve seen photographs of President Roosevelt from around that time, and there was more than a hint of death in his face. The ravages of untreated hypertension, perhaps.

Speaking of presidents, one of our most recent Star Trek episodes was the one in which Abraham Lincoln gets a spear in the back. As Capt. Kirk said, it was a little hard to watch. So was the episode, though it wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered. Just mostly. I don’t feel like looking up the title. If you know it, you know it.

One interesting detail, though. Faux-Lincoln comes to the Enterprise bridge and, among other things, has a short interaction with Uhura. He uses a certain word and apologizes, afraid that he has offended her. To which, Uhura says:

“See, in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.”

Of all the many optimistic things Star Trek ever expressed about the future, that has to be the most optimistic of all.

Snow Days No Mo’

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“A major winter storm swept through the Mid-Atlantic on its way to the Northeast, bringing heavy snow, freezing rain and dangerous driving conditions,” I noted in the NYT this evening.

Not a particle of snow hereabouts, but I’m sure our turn will come eventually. That made me wonder: are snow days now things of the past? Even when kids are back in school in person again, say next winter, a heavy blizzard would mean they have to stay home, but they can still go to school remotely, as they do now. I suspect most kids don’t realize this yet. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth when they do.

Not that it matters in this household any more. Next year in college, if Ann feels like a snow day, she’ll cut classes. But she and her sister might be in the last generation, in this country at least, to remember getting out of school for inclement weather.

The concept was mostly hypothetical to me as a student. During my entire K-12 run in Texas I only got two that I remember. As a parent, I’ve experienced a good many more than that.

Return of the Zhu-Zhus

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“A line of severe storms slammed through downtown Chicago and surrounding areas Monday, downing trees and power lines, which sparked fires in the city, officials said,” CNN reported last night. That, and there was some riotous looting too.

“More than a million homes and businesses in the Midwest are without power, including a third of all of customers in Iowa,” CNN continued. “The wind was so strong when the storm passed through Perry, Iowa, it blew pieces of boards from other buildings into the walls of a house.”

So we lucked out. As I mentioned, the winds were fairly tame in my tiny corner of the world. After such wind and rain as we had had passed yesterday, I went out in the yard to pick up items that moved around a little, such as one of the deck chairs. The sun had returned and I noticed the rain-speckled hibiscus picking up the light.hibiscusToday we opened up a box that has been sitting in our laundry room for a good many years, tucked under a few other boxes. I call it a laundry room, but being home to the washer and dryer is only one of its functions. Crap we don’t want to put partly out in the elements — in the garage, that is — goes there.

On Saturday, since this is a Summer of Nowhere, I spent a fair number of hours in the garage, till the trash bin was mostly full and garage crap had been rearranged somewhat.

Back to the box. Among many other things, it contained five Zhu-Zhu Pets. Mechanical hamsters, since I’m not sure they rise to the level of robot hamsters.

Ann marveled at them. Her 17-year-old self reflected on how important they were to her seven-year-old self. She got her first one for that birthday. Like most toys, they were important until they weren’t.
What amazed me was that the batteries have held out on all of them. They all still move around and make various preprogramed noises.

That’s about 20 seconds of randomly selected Zhu-Zhu Pet sounds, squeaks and whirs coming directly from 2010 to you in 2020.

Hail!

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Yesterday evening, rain was forecast possible and clouds rolled along.

Temps were a pleasant 70 F. or so. I sat on the deck and waited for the rain. Mostly I saw cloud-to-cloud lightning a few miles away to the south, which has a fascination all its own. It was never near enough to drive me inside, and not much rain came either by dark.

Today was a different story. Just before 5 p.m., heavy rain started to fall. With some hail. Luckily not too large, but enough to make a tink! sound when it hit a metal yard ornament in our front yard. Hail, or at least its streaks, is visible against the backdrop of a neighbor’s house.

When I was 11 or 12, golfball-sized hail fell as I watched from our kitchen window. The ice slammed into the yard and bounced every which way. It was over in two minutes. A minute? Not long, but impressive. I collected a few and kept them in the freezer until they merged with the other frost. It was Texas hail. You know, bigger like everything else.

The Witch of November 2019

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It hasn’t just been cold for November since Monday, temps have been reaching into the realm of damn cold, briefly dropping below zero Fahrenheit early this morning, or maybe into imaginary numbers. Later in the day, it reached a balmy 25 degrees or so. Bah.

It’s a major early winter weather event, now gripping much of the nation. Guess that means I’m a part of something larger than myself. They say that’s important for self-esteem, or happiness, or something, but I don’t think weather events count toward that sense of belonging.

Also, northern Illinois got about three inches of snow on Monday. Not the first time I’ve seen Veterans Day-Armistice Day snow, but more fell than in 2013. At least we didn’t get hit with something along the lines of the Armistice Day blizzard of 1940 or the Big Blow of 1913, both of which showed the power of the Witch of November.

This Gelid Day

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I got up this morning and before long pulled up the Weather Underground page for my suburb. At about 9 a.m. the temperature was minus 23 F. “Feels like minus 43,” the site helpfully added, since there was some wind.

At O’Hare, the low was one degree colder, it seems. “This morning’s minimum of 24 below zero was the coldest in Chicago in the 36 years since the morning of January 20, 1985, when Chicago’s all-time record low of minus 27 was recorded,” WGN reports. Even in Nashville, I remember that things were pretty cold around that time in ’85.

Not to worry, we had a high of minus 15 F. to look forward to today. That happened around 1 in the afternoon, but as of about 7 p.m. we were back to 17 below. Remarkably, the weather savants say that the local air will be above freezing by the weekend. Hope so.

Early in the afternoon, the dog wanted to go out to do what dogs do outside. So I let her out. During the minute or so she spent in the frozen landscape, I couldn’t resist the urge to document the scene — as quickly as possible through a door that was open for a few seconds.
No adjustment of the image necessary. Looks like the camera also caught light dispersing through ice crystals in the gelid air.

At temps like this, it’s easy to anthropomorphize the cold. It feels like the cold is pressing on all the doors and windows, trying to put its icy fingers through the cracks, eager to invade the house and equalize the temperature outside and inside. As if central heating is an affront to its idea of the way things should be.

My work desk faces an outside window. Even wearing socks, I could feel the temps under the desk to be lower than usual today. Behind one of our kitchen cabinets is an exterior wall. The air was noticeably cooler in the cabinet today. Last night, I heard the house pop and creak a little as the outside temps dipped below zero. That is unnerving.

Some years ago, an occasional BTST reader said, you sure write about the weather a lot. The implication was, I think, why are you wasting your time with trivia like that?

I’ve thought about that question occasionally since then. Odd what some people consider trivial. Like the weather. Which is the state of the atmosphere in which we live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for a handful of astronauts for a little while. You’d think it would be worth some attention.

Actually, in this iteration of BTST at least, weather is a main category in only about 10 percent of the postings: 132 of a total of 1,342. Seems like a healthy amount of attention to me.

Of that category, only 18 postings (like today) are tagged “dangerous weather,” all of which I’ve experienced myself. Winter storms, hurricanes, very heavy rains, high heat, usw. (Well, I’ve never been near a hurricane, but I did hear a typhoon rush by outside in Osaka.) “Unpleasant weather” gets 43 tags while “pleasant weather” gets 23, so I guess I’m not one to accentuate the positive when it comes to atmospheric conditions.

Ignore the weather at your peril. The unnamed protagonist in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” didn’t give it much thought, and look where it got him: frozen to death.

“Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.”