Lot of lightning here in the last few days, a loud storm last night, and another about an hour ago followed by a loud cloudburst which I'm hearing from the public computer room. Glad for the rain because the lightning has started lots of wildfires recently.
It has been mid 80s F, but mostly cloudy today. I did manage to visit the neighborhood creek and snag a couple dragonflies and I am shooting portraits right now. Suddenly the scent of rain became so strong it brought a storm of pleasant memories.
What if Eleanor Roosevelt had wings? -- Monty Python
One important characteristic of a theory is that is has survived repeated attempts to falsify it. Contrary to your understanding, all available evidence confirms it. --Subbie
If evolution is shown to be false, it will be at the hands of things that are true, not made up. --percy
The reason that we have the scientific method is because common sense isn't reliable. -- Taq
It has been a fucking hot 110F (43C) today without a cloud in the sky. Here at 9 PM with the sun down it is still a fucking hot 105 with forecasts of fucking hot for tomorrow and calls for the three-day forecast to be fucking hot, fucking hot and fucking hot. A lingering sense of fucking hot so strong it brought a fucking hot reminder of the fucking hot yet to come through early October.
When we arrived at Grand Forks AFB, ND, in July 1977, the base chaplain started the welcome-aboard briefing with a joke:
quote:Despite what you may have heard, there are four seasons in North Dakota: June, July, August, and Winter.
We were still young and naïve enough to have thought that was a joke. It wasn't. Grand Forks is in the north-eastern corner of North Dakota, so it's in the same region as International Falls, MN, which is traditionally the coldest place in the lower 48 states. The reason for that is that there's nothing to block those arctic air masses coming down from Canada -- it's actually much warmer in south-western North Dakota because of the hilly terrain.
We also received a welcome-aboard package with booklets, brochures, maps, and a floppy record (remember those things?). We started playing it and the first thing we heard was the howling of the winter wind. The second sound was us turning the stereo off. We never did hear any of the rest of that thing.
TRIVIA: The Fahrenheit and Celsius scales meet at -40°. I personally saw them wave at each other as they met there.
In northwestern WI we at least have the big lake to moderate temperatures in the summer and the winter and the summer. We are only five miles from the lake, but we can be 15-20 degrees cooler or hotter than it is right next to the lake.
Facts don't lie or have an agenda. Facts are just facts
"God did it" is not an argument. It is an excuse for intellectual laziness.
If your viewpoint has merits and facts to back it up why would you have to lie?
More moderate temperatures, but I bet you get a lot more precipitation, like lots of snow throughout the winter.
Before our first winter, locals told us that it would get too cold to snow. We didn't believe them, but it's true. We'd get most of our snow in the early winter when it was still warm enough and then some more at the end of winter when it had started warming up again, but inbetween the wind would just redistribute what had already fallen, mixing it with dirt to make "snirt".
Relative humidity depends on a number of factors (see Psychrometrics) including pressure, temperature, and amount of water vapor in the air. Warm air can hold more water vapor, but cold air much less. Since the really cold weather came down from Canada over a lot of land, that cold air didn't bring in much snow if any. Most of our storms was warmer air coming from the west, but in that case a lot of the snow had already fallen over the mountains. Sometimes we'd get a storm from the south, but the monster snowfalls would be the storms from the east bring water from the Great Lakes. In our five years there, we never saw a storm from the east, but there was such a storm a couple years before we arrived in which the entire side of a house would be buried in snow.
Another aspect of our winters was the extremely low humidity. To begin with, the air would be too cold to hold much water vapor. So then you bring that dry air indoors and heat it up with your furnace. Heating air lowers relative humidity, so that would drive the humidity indoors far lower. The furnaces would have a humidifier attached to them to bring the indoor humidity up to comfortable levels; that was the first that I had ever heard of such a thing.
A few years ago I saw a video on YouTube of a field of ice advancing into a back yard by a large northern lake. You could visibly see it move in real time and it was forming large ice crystals.
I just now did a YouTube search on lake effect ice and found that same video again:
In an unfair comparison, winter in Southern California is just cold (albeit above freezing most of the time) and wet. That's our rainy season, when it happens.
My mother's family was from Illinois near Peoria. When her mother would come out to visit around Xmas time, she would always complain about how cold it was here even though temperature-wise it was much colder in Illinois. I think it was like I observed about how much dryer it is in the northern winters, so it was more the cold dampness that she was feeling.
Also, cold is relative and you get acclimatized. I was born and raised in Orange County here, so North Dakota was my first experience living in the really cold. I wore thermal underwear under my jeans, double-socks (wool & black cotton for when I was in uniform) in my combat boots. Flannel shirt and t-shirt under my Air Force parka, plus ski gloves; usually the hood was enough to keep my head warm, but sometimes I would wear a watch cap or my "Russian hat" (old USAAF-issue flight helmet). That kept me comfortably warm enough. I once saw a parka with a tear in it and was amazed to see that its lining was an Army blanket.
Anyway, it's amazing how much difference certain temperatures can make, such as when you hit freezing, then 10°F, then 0°F (isopropyl alcohol will no longer serve as gas-line anti-freeze so you need something stronger), then -10°F, then -20°F (you might need some ether to get your car started because the engine is below the flash point for the gasoline-air mixture). At the end of the first winter when the temperature soared to a blistering 33°F, I had to take off my gloves and keep my parka open, because it was just too damned hot! On the roofs on Fraternity Row across from the university, students were sprawled out in their bathing suits sunbathing. At 33°F.
Edited by dwise1, : Made correction: "into a back yard by one of the Great Lakes." to "into a back yard by a large northern lake."
That video was from Mille Lacs Lake, one of the larger interior lakes of Minnesota. That info is from the youtube source page. If you go there, there is another video of something like it but much larger.
My laptop (having my login info) doesn't like to play youtube videos, so I had to go to a different computer to view it. Thus I don't have a link for the other video at hand.
I found out the dragon flies around my house are Blue Dashers. They actually saved me from some wasp the other day. I was cleaning up around a fence when I disturbed a red wasp nest and several angry wasp went flying up away from their nest. I was expecting to get pummeled by them and was running like hell with my hands over my head but not one got me. I looked up and there where several blue dashers intercepting the wasp on the wing with vigor. They are amazing hunters and I never knew they took wasp like that.
Edited by 1.61803, : spelling
"You were not there for the beginning. You will not be there for the end. Your knowledge of what is going on can only be superficial and relative" William S. Burroughs
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