The wall street journal reports.
Look at my backyard!
Jim came home an hour early yesterday. The reason? Argonne told employees to leave because they were anticipating a huge blizzard. It was raining at that point– and the temperature was just on the bubble for snow. But snow had not yet fallen.
It has been very windy out. We had rain and “wintry mix” all evening. (I hate “wintry mix”). The record long period of ‘no snow’ in Chicago has ended (I assume. I’m in the suburbs.) But we haven’t gotten the feet of snow I read about in Madison, Dubuque, etc. I’ll update the photo if any accumulates today.
Jim’s theory is we aren’t getting snow because we inherited a snow blower. I suspect that effect won’t last through March.
“Jim’s theory is we aren’t getting snow because we inherited a snow blower.”
If that is true, a lot of people in the north and northeast should run out a buy snow blowers. 😉
Just in time for Christmas. Consider it a blessing. 🙂
Just take a short drive up to Madison and you’ll see puh-lenty of snow. . .
The snow-blower is man’s best invention—20+ years in WNY.
mwgrant–
I don’t know. I kinda gotta give my votes to washing machines, dryers, vaccuumn cleaners, dishwashers and refrigerators. Shoveling snow is not fun, but it’s not a daily/weekly thing like washing dishes. Lawnmowers are up there– but *if* we didn’t have mowers, more people could reduce mowing by having patios and less lawn intensive landscaping.
Is “wintery mix” what English people call “sleet”?
MarkR–
I’m not sure. I think of sleet as a subset of “wintry mix”. Depending on the precise mix, wintry mixes can include: hail, snow mixed with rain, freezing rain, etc. Freezing rain is the subset of ‘wintry mix” where the water is liquid when it falls from clouds but then freezes on the way down. I think sleet is the specific subset “freezing rain” that causes little pellets of ice to bounce on the ground and stay frozen. But… we can also get freezing rain when the ground is cold and the freezing happens on the ground. I’m not sure if that’s also “sleet”.
But wintry mix also encompasses very wet snow that just melts as it falls. That’s not sleet. It might also might include bits of hail etc. Often “wintry mix” storm will have periods of rain, periods of snow, periods of sleet and so on. It’s horrible.
Large hailstones don’t seem to be common in “wintry mix”. Large hail sometimes happens in oddball summer storms where the hail formed in the clouds and finally falls. That is often accompanied by rain, but at relatively warm temperatures. But in very odd circumstances, we could get some hail in a “wintry mix”.
Last night was “wintry mix”.
lucia-
oh I forgot…refrigerators. now you’re making the decision tough!
Amen. Landscaping impacts to snow too. I moved there from a job in the deep South and bought an old home with mature landscaping including chest-high hedge running much of both edges of the driveway, had a large corner lot with sidewalk…didn’t really know about L.Erie’s textbook lake-effect. (Summer yard-work required ladders and scaffolding.) Just for the record–I in fact am very fond of the Buffalo area and grew to look forward to the winters there. Go Sabres[whenever]! Go Bills!
According to Wiki:
“In the United States, wintry mix generally refers to a mixture of freezing rain, ice pellets, and snow. In contrast to the usage in the United Kingdom, in the United States it is usually used when air and ground temperatures are below 0 °C (32 °F). Additionally, it is generally used when some accumulation of ice and snow is expected to occur.”
.
Also according to Wiki:
“Freezing rain is the name given to rain that falls when surface temperatures are below freezing. Unlike rain and snow mixed, ice pellets, or hail, freezing rain is made entirely of liquid droplets. The raindrops become supercooled while passing through a sub-freezing layer of air many hundreds of feet above the surface, and then freeze upon impact with any object they encounter. The resulting ice, called glaze, can accumulate to a thickness of several centimeters. The METAR code for freezing rain is FZRA.”
.
The middle part of the Atlantic East Coast frequently has freezing rain, with lots of tree damage from the weight of ice and downed power lines from breaking tree limbs.
mwgrant
When I was in first grade, we moved from El Salvador to Buffalo, NY. In January. Imagine. (Our travel path was El Salvador-> vacation in Acupulco-> Visit to Mom’s friend in Austin-> rental car to grandparents in Buffalo, NY.)
Mom knit lots of slippers on the drive from Texas to NY.)
lucia-
Now that was a change…quite a trek too. [Good thing, too. Your mom probably needed the time to maximize slipper production.] Buffalo–to me a much wrongly maligned city–good people.
Thinking of that place 🙂
Last evening the wife and I were headed out to dinner with friends at a restaurant not very far from home. The wife was anxious about the weather after a steady diet of it all afternoon from the TV. She almost had me call off the dinner until I prevailed with my argument that older people get stereotyped as believing all weather reports on TV and then being afraid to leave the house all winter.
When we got half way there I thought I was going to hear “I told you so” all night long as the visibility was reduced and it was snowing sidewise – no ice or sleet just snow and gusting winds. After a couple glasses of wine and a sambuca the wife was much relaxed and our ride home was uneventful with no ice or snow accumulation on roads.
In English usage, sleet is specifically a mixture of rain and snow. I’ve never heard any alternative definition. The correct term for soft pellets is graupel, although that is from German, not English.
The snow here (Tohoku) has started unusually early. Normally it doesn’t settle in town until the last week of December. This year it settled in the first week, and we’ve had about 1 metre already. That means an 05:15 start for me to get our shopfront, footpath and parking clear for business to open at 08:30. Only another 2 1/2 months to go before the snow stops and I can stay warm in bed.
Hector–
This is very late for a first snow around here. That said, the heaviest snow is generally in late Feb- early April. Aprils snows– when they occur– are deep, wet and melt quickly.
Lucia
That is settled snow, not first snow. First snow will come in November. Twice I’ve been caught by 20-30cm on summer tyres in November, never again. Normally anything before Christmas doesn’t last. This year the blanket has been complete for 3 weeks.
We get a mega- lake effect here, with a polar airstream from Siberia crossing the (warm) Sea of Japan, about a 1,000km fetch.
The actual numbers (in town, not up the mountain) look like this:
http://img211.imageshack.us/img211/424/oishidasnowfall.png
The blue line is snowfall measured daily. The orange line is the thickness of the blanket.
Here’s my nextdoor neighbour’s rice field. The pole is 3 metres high, and the bands are 30cm.
http://img685.imageshack.us/img685/6439/sdsc4054.jpg
On the Pacific side, the Bering Sea ice anomaly is positive for this date, but the Sea of Okhotsk is negative. On the Atlantic side, the Baltic Sea, according to MASIE, is about a month ahead of last year. There’s apparently still a lot of warm water coming towards the Arctic Ocean from the south because the Barents and Kara Seas aren’t freezing very fast. If the AMO continues to decline, it could be a cold winter in the NH.
Lucia, Hector
I would say that in the UK sleet is anything which is partly liquid and partly frozen, not completely frozen and “dry” like snow, and has no solid ice in it like hail. I’m not sure if it falls as separate snow and rain and merges on the way down or on impact. Anyway. Merry Christmas to all!
Lucia:
It’s a late first snow for a lot of the midwest.
535 snowfall records in the last week.
http://mapcenter.hamweather.com/records/7day/us.html?c=snow
Rainier Paradise Rs WA – old Record 20, new record 54″
Burney CA – Old Record 10″ , new record 26.5″
Merry Christmas, Lucia–and a happy New Year!
Re inventions: has anyone ever tried using a lawnmower as a snow blower?
“535 snowfall records in the last week.”
As predicted. Low ice extent correlates with increased winter snowfall in the NH. See Dr. Curry.
Steven Mosher:
We can hope for that. Increased winter snowfall allows for with better adaptability to natural summertime variability in rain fall, at least downstream from areas with significant snow packs….
So far Boston is on track for a repeat of the “year without a winter” that we had last year. Not that I’m complaining!
“Low ice extent correlates with increased winter snowfall in the NH”
It is always interesting to come across articles with data up to 2008 that say:
“Snow cover extent has continued to decline and is projected to decline further, despite the projected increase in winter snowfall in some areas.”
http://www.grida.no/graphicslib/detail/anomalies-in-northern-hemisphere-snow-cover_124b
Or 2005:
“This shows Northern Hemisphere snow-covered area departures from monthly means, 1978-2005, from NOAA snow charts (orange) and microwave satellite (purple/green) data sets. The NOAA time series for this period exhibits a significant decreasing trend of -2.0 percent per decade (solid orange line);”
http://nsidc.org/cryosphere/sotc/snow_extent.html
What a difference a few years makes:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/service/global/snowcover-nhland/201211.gif
Jit,
When I was very young I tried using a power mower for a snow blower. It wouldn’t start so we never did find out whether this was actually a good idea. It was a Jacobsen reel type – one of the orange ones. On further reflection, i doubt it would have done the job given that the Chicago snow was about 3-4 feet.
But I got to do the job in any case.
No white Christmas here – not even wintry mix. 39C forecast today.
Re: Nick Stokes (Dec 22 17:29),
Yes, well in Oz it would be: I’m dreaming of a white June 25, or Queen’s birthday or something like that, assuming you get any snowfall in your winter and your location at all.
DeWitt,
No, we don’t get snow here, but in the mountains near, and it can be unpredictable. Here is an amazing scene from a few years ago. Mt Buller – our nearest ski resort, was surrounded by fire for days. Huge anxiety- no way out and the fires came right to the edge. But on Xmas eve, first some rain and then snow put out the fires.
-25C this morning (southern alberta)…Dec 25, 2011 (last year) we hit +9!…when is my vacation south again?….
Happy New Year, Lucia.