Pellice

The Washington Post has produced an interesting article on the increase in winter temperatures that includes an eye-catching map and listings of temperature increases per decade since 1980 for individual cities.

Winter is warming almost everywhere. See how it’s changed in your town

The Post is behind a paywall, but I think the first few articles are free.

The author even gives a detailed account of his methodology which would be of interest to data nerds here.

New Brunswick, NJ, has increased nearly 1 degree F per decade, 0.93 F.

I have a question about last Saturday's snow.  It was very light and fluffy, but it also seemed to have very high water content, melting immediately if I even lightly touched it.  Not sure I could have even gathered it into a snowball before melting.  I thought those qualities - the lightness/fluffiness and the high water content - were incompatible, that wet snow was always heavy snow, but clearly that isn't the case.  Is this type of snow rare, or was my impression incorrect?

30 minutes ago, Brasiluvsnow said:

 the phrase global warming suddenly becoming climate change is interesting 

A 2023 book,  "The Parrot and the Igloo:  Climate and the Science of Denial," by David Lipsky goes into this exact subject in detail.  

9 hours ago, Dark Star said:

Except activists aren't necessarily logical, take for instance arsonists on the left coast.  

It's not just activists vs. "rational people."  Many scientists and organizations are working hard to try to mitigate and meld new technologies to lessen and perhaps improve their effects on the life of this planet.  For example, the Nature Conservancy and American Bird Conservancy have developed maps for siting wind turbines where they will least effect the migratory corridors of birds and other species.  A widening "lights out" campaign is attempting to get bright urban areas to turn down lights on nights of predicted high  bird migration.   New glass formulations can reduce collisions.

All of these cost extra money. Will it be spent

Idly websurfing and came across this site: https://adventuregearinsider.com/snow-gods-and-goddesses-of-winter/

Ullr (who is already known to AMWX, particularly the NE forum, where sacrifices have already been suggested).

"A product of Norse mythology, Ullr is known as the God of Snow, Patron Saint of Skiers, the son of Sif and stepson of Thor, the God of Thunder. Cold-loving, bow-wielding Ullr (pronounced Oool-er) is said to be an expert skater, skier and hunter who would glide around the world and cover the land with snow."

Khione

Khione or Chione was the daughter of Boreas (the god of the north wind) and Oreithyia, the lady of mountain gales. Not much is said of Khione except that she was one of the consorts or mistresses of Poseidon. She lives a lonely life in the mountain tops and has been known to turn people into ice sculptures from time to time. Definitely not a god you want to anger while out on the slopes.

From the Orthodox tradition, a patron saint:

"Tradition states, the day of St. Dimitar feast (Oct. 26) is said to be the day when the weather breaks and winter begins. According to traditional belief on this day the skies open up, after which we can expect the first snow. Dimitar is the patron saint of winter, cold and snow."

However, as you can imagine, there are more saints to pray to for deliverance from winter.

Last night, October 12-13, turned out to be by far the biggest night of bird migration this fall.  (Most landbirds migrate at night).  Weather conditions - clear sky, light northwest winds, were ideal.  Cornell University's Birdcast estimated about 17 million birds crossed New Jersey during the night (alas, that doesn't mean they all land here).  The UCAR radar site shows the overnight migration clearly.  The first wave of our summer resident birds going south has already passed; these new birds are mostly our winter residents from the north - white-throated sparrows, juncos, yellow-rumped warblers.  I saw my first string of migrating wild geese.  It's been a fairly good fall migration, enough frontal passages reaching the coast to bring some waves of birds with them. That doesn't always happen, too often there are persistant east-northeast winds.  

Aftermaths of hurricanes and tropical storms are intensely followed (literally) by birders checking for seabirds and tropical species somehow displaced by the storms.  But flamingoes after Idalia!  That was a new one!

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2023/09/03/flamingos-all-over-east-coast-post-idalia/70738375007/  

gave some anecdotes from stunned birders, and Cornell University's Ornithology Lab had a more technical take on it:

https://birdcast.info/news/in-the-pink-american-flamingo-madness-in-late-summer-2023/

Flamingoes are rare and difficult to see even in southernmost Florida, and not typically one of the displaced species.  Much speculation about this widespread fallout to come.

Third season gardening.  This upcoming hot week hurried me to get seeds in the ground for fall lettuces, spinach, and other greens, plus radishes and sweet turnips.  Some I planted last week have sprouted nicely.  Barring an early September frost (I remember September 9 one year!) I will have good pickings until December for these, and throughout winter, for a few things like the spinach, upland cress, and (especially) mache lettuce, aka corn salad, which grows all winter and is not one of the bitter greens, but a mild, pleasant, though small-leafed, green.  I am trying a couple of varieties of truly cold-weather lettuces this year, from Germany and Austria, according to the seed companies.

I have too much shade in my plot to grow a lot of the standard summer vegetables, though cherry tomatoes, pole beans, and cucumbers don't need too much. But in winter, with leaves gone and the sun at a low angle providing a lot of hours on my SE facing garden, there's a lot one can do to prolong the season.  It's fun to try various things.

Was just out in the garden for an hour with the accompaniment of near constant thundering - but barely audible.  It was at the lowest level of my awareness.  At times I thought I was hearing airplanes.  Is there some mechanism where a number of different, distant storms can produce this effect (nonstop barely audible thundering), or is a single storm cell capable of generating constant thunder for a long time?

There certainly ought to be some Germanic term for this effect!  I looked up "growling thunder"  in German, which is "grollender Donner," which does give a good impression of the sound.

Yesterday, May 13, was NJ's World Series of Birding, held annually on the second Saturday in May (and now part of a larger "Big Day" of birding observed globally.  It was the 40th anniversary of the event, which was begun around the peak of spring bird migration and involves counting every species seen.  The total in NJ routinely goes over 200 species.

As you can imagine, the event is HEAVILY influenced by weather, and yesterday saw the first good weather system in five years.  (2020 saw snow in some areas!)  Ideal is overnight southwesterly winds, since most songbirds migrate at night, with a light rain shower right at dawn to bring them down.  Warm fronts from the southwest in spring have been very scarce these last years, but this stretch around May 5 has produced in northern Jersey!  And more migration weather to come this week!

I was reading a cooking newsletter this morning that featured extracts from Frances Trollope (mother of novelist Anthony Trollope) about her observations on American cooking and dining habits in the late 1820s.  It contained a passage about American sleigh-riding, which I thought might interest the snow-lovers in this forum:

Quote

The sleighs are delightful, and constructed at so little expense that I wonder we have not all got them in England, lying by, in waiting for the snow, which often remains with us long enough to permit their use. Sleighing is much more generally enjoyed by night than by day, for what reason I could never discover, unless it be, that no gentlemen are to be found disengaged from business in the mornings. Nothing, certainly, can be more agreeable than the gliding smoothly and rapidly along, deep sunk in soft furs, the moon shining with almost midday splendour, the air of crystal brightness, and the snow sparkling on every side, as if it were sprinkled with diamonds. And then the noiseless movement of the horses, so mysterious and unwonted, and the gentle tinkling of the bells you meet and carry, all help at once to sooth and excite the spirits: in short, I had not the least objection to sleighing by night; I only wished to sleigh by day also."
Trollope, Frances Milton. Domestic Manners of the Americans, Volume 1. 1832
 

And I wondered, first, whether any of you have ever experienced an actual horse-drawn sleigh ride, and second, how deep, and what kind, of snow would be required to support a sleigh and horses.

Fun article in the NY Times today about meteorologists' largely unsuccessful attempts to beat back weather hyperbole:

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/science/weather-forecasts-language.html  

1st 10 articles per month are free, so should not be behind a paywall, yet.

Hearing people on TV trying to argue that Ian "should have" been a Category 5, and maybe they would then more would have heeded warnings.  But I think it's important to reinforce the idea that hurricanes don't have to be "Cat 5" to be lethal, that lower designations are also dangerous.  Ian will be an important example to be cited in the future.

If this is the "great weather" westerners claim for themselves, then they can keep it.  I'd NEVER move to the southwest and experience this weather or worse, day after day.  And yes, I know it's drier (although this has been pretty dry the last couple of days), but that just means fewer, if any, clouds, and no prospects of rain.  If I didn't have rain every few days, and interesting clouds, and changeable weather, I'd sorely miss it.  Who would want to retire to a place with weather like this?  Ugh! [heat-driven rant over].

Well, the fate of this year's spring birding season is just about sealed.  Tomorrow is the statewide World Series of Birding, and it's looking to be just as flat as the rest of this spring's migration has been.  We needed several warm fronts with southerly, preferably southwesterly light overnight winds, and we didn't get them.  One night of southerly winds, night of May 2, and it was followed by good numbers of arriving birds - but May 3 was rainy and very overcast, and the birds were not inclined to sing, and the lack of sun made most of them horribly backlit.  You can actually see migration routes shifting inland.  The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's new "migration dashboard" - https://birdcast.info/ - is somehow able to use radar to give good estimates of overhead migration at night, and I could see birds dividing around New Castle County in Delaware and heading inland following the spine of the eastern Appalachian ridge rather than the coast.

This has been the most recent of a number of consecutive years of poor spring migration in New Jersey, all due to rather relentless easterly and northeasterly winds, occasionally strong.  There's fear the spring weather patterns are shifting for good.

While awaiting this coming storm, a really good tick-tock about how a lot of humans can cause a snowstorm to snowball into a crisis.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/01/27/i95-traffic-backup-winter-storm/
This was the epic emergency in Virginia and Washington in early January.  Not our forum, but ... it couldn't happen here, right?

48 minutes ago, wdrag said:

Regarding the attached graphics (01z/12):  Birds on radar  or not…

Need to check loops of reflectivity,  the VAD wind profile versus modeled wind below 3000 feet for nighttime migration, and preponderance of 20 DBZ reflectivity near roosting areas (example along lakes). Also against bird migration prediction-example attached graphic.  

To see the birds in the  morning, you'll need to see concentric rings take off during the morning.  But this was a nighttime radar image. I and others typically referenced these radar clutter's as AP.  I don't think it's clear that this was caused by bird migration although the fall bird migration period begins about this time.  I may have more confirmatory information, one way or the other in a few days.

What you can assume from most of the radars, is a mix of clutter, dust, insects, and possibly birds near the radar. The velocity measures dust/moisture etc at the intersected elevation.  Here is a link... examples are provided.https://www.weather.gov/iln/birds.

I've referenced a peer reviewed paper in the the AMS Journal Weather and Forecasting.  

Well, I can confirm it.  When you see that general "bloom" right after sunset, that's the ticket!  In spring and fall, that's birds taking off.  As a bird watcher, I pay close attention to nighttime radar in spring and fall, also wind and precipitation.  Yesterday, September 15, 2020 followed a night of good-looking radar, with the only caveat that there was no precipitation in the NYC-NJ area to get birds to land near daybreak.  Nevertheless, it was a good migration day along the coast with high numbers and variety of migrating birds that landed and foraged until they could take off the following night.  (Most landbirds migrate at night).

The still-to-be-worked out problem is that sometimes - actually more often than not - the radar looks great but the birds are not there in quantity in the morning.  They seem to stay aloft and keep going in clear weather with favorable winds.  Also, again using yesterday as an example, the birds did come down and were foraging all day - but then they took off again that night even though the winds - S rather than NW - were unfavorable.  This too is a "problem" yet to be solved.

And Britain is getting the East Coast's winter - the tabloid Daily Mail's UK front page (not the US, the UK) is half full of stories on "Storm Ciara" which is blasting, with 90+ and 8+ mph winds, a story on surfers riding wages up a river, disruptions at airports.  Here's one: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7988499/Britain-faces-fresh-SNOW-ice-warning-tonight-tomorrow.html

They are already anticipating that this storm hitting now will be battering them this weekend.

5 minutes ago, purduewx80 said:

Dewpoints have increased to 45-50 degrees in and behind the rain. The ground is certainly colder than that (and now wet) due to our recent cold spell. With the center of the low moving through, winds are quite light, so that explains the shallow fog (cold ground cools the near-sfc air temp to the dewpoint). If winds weren't increasing later, it would probably deepen/worsen overnight.

Thanks so much, I was really curious.

I am wondering why some low level ground fog has developed following the cessation of the rain.  I checked the temperature, and there hasn't been any surge of much warmer air, nor did the sun come out (as happens in summer sometimes).  I would have thought that the fog would form only if warmer temperatures were moving over colder ground.  The ground is still frozen a little further down, but the precip that fell today was all liquid.  The temperature has barely varied a degree all day. 

Just curious about the fog.

Yet another flash flood watch posted for much of NJ, with some amounts of 5" possible!!  Have the criteria changed this summer, or are we really seeing this many instances of flooding?

Putting this in the banter thread since it's not directly concerned with storm forecasting and movement.

Is Mexico Beach even likely to be rebuilt? That is, are the property owners there wealthy enough to tenaciously pursue insurance settlements and governmental subsidies and grants so as to rebuild?  I am in New Jersey, and there was a bifurcation of outcomes from Sandy.  Some poorer areas, mostly inland along rivers, were abandoned and residents sought buyouts. Wealthy barrier islands are completely rebuilt to even wealthier standards.  

I guess the two possible outcomes in Mexico beach are abandonment to a return to a natural state, or bargain sales of lots to those wealthy enough to build housing to the most rigorous standards. Somewhere I read that many of the barrier islands along the Florida panhandle are largely the domain of fewer, but wealthier, residents due to the succession of storms over the years.