Last Snowfall of the Winter

Mother Nature managed to sneak in one last snowfall before the end of winter, dropping about an inch and a half of snow on Monday night that quickly melted under the peeks of sunshine that Tuesday brought us.  Wednesday - today - is the vernal equinox, the first day of spring.  Light lasts longer than darkness for the next six months in the Northern Hemisphere...day is now longer than night.  Warmer weather, more sunlight, more birds, more wildlife, the emergence of the leaves, and the blossoming of flowers are sure to follow.

But for now, I want to offer one last glimpse back at winter.  I shot a video of the snow falling along Fall Creek in my backyard and put together some music to accompany it.  This time, the music isn't completely original, but it interweaves and develops two wintry themes written by Russian composers: Prokofiev's Troika and Tchaikovsky's Waltz of the Snowflakes from The Nutcracker.  The result, I think, is an appropriate accompaniment to this wintry scene.  There are two versions...if you've stumbled on this page somehow without knowing me, one of them is as close as you'll come to hearing my voice!

The all-electronic version:

 

The electronic-plus-acoustic version (twenty-some takes later...):

Found: My Lost Snowboard

While I was fixing dinner tonight, I glanced out the kitchen window and noticed a white board lying on the grass.  I had a hunch, but went outside to confirm: it's my long-lost snowboard (for measuring snow, not coasting over it).  It had blown away during high winds a month or two ago, and now it had re-surfaced from where ever it was hiding.  The hiding place was apparently a bit muddy, because the board was dirtier than the last time I saw it.  In any event, I think, given the inability of the old snowboard to resist the stronger winds, it's time to retire it and put it out of its misery.

The Great Snowblower of Freeville: Spotted!

In my post about the February snowstorm, I noted that the sidewalks of Freeville are usually cleared by one generous individual.  Even after we received a half-inch of fluffy snow one day earlier this week, I found that he still took the time to clear the sidewalks.  Later, on Thursday, I finally spotted him in action.  It's not just a snowblower...it's a John Deere tractor with a snowblower on the front.  I guess he's pretty comfortable while he's out there clearing the sidewalks!  And I bet he can clear all of Freeville's sidewalks in about the same amount of time it takes me to shovel my driveway.  Well, chalk that up as one mystery (partially) solved!

Ithacation

We had a mess of a storm come through late yesterday afternoon through earlier this afternoon, bringing pretty much every type of winter precipitation with it.  At times, it was simultaneously snowing, sleeting, and raining.  We have a word for this here in the Ithaca area - ithacation.  It's ithacating when you don't exactly know what's falling from the sky, but you know you don't like it.

In these two photos, I hope you can make out both the large snowflakes that were falling and the small ripples on the surface of Fall Creek due to rain and water drops dripping off of the branches.

Some branches were covered by only water drops, while others had snow on them as well.  Welcome to late winter snowstorms in Freeville. 

Historical Snow Cover

While I wait to be able to upload photos from my camera, I have to make due in the meantime.  So the next couple of days will feature photo-less posts.

About a month ago, I ran across an interesting web site that shows U.S. snow cover maps for the last 10 years or so.  Pick a day in the last 10 years (your birthday, perhaps, if it falls in the winter) and see how much snow was on the ground.  My birthday happened to be yesterday...hence the day off from the blog.  All of my life, I had been hoping for a snowstorm on my birthday, and two years ago, it finally happened.  We picked up a couple of inches from the 24th into the 25th, and another 6 inches on my birthday (the 25th).  It was one of my better birthdays.

I went back and looked at the historical snow cover maps for the last 10 years, all but one of which I was living in Ithaca.  It looks like there has always been at least a trace of snow on the ground for my birthday, and it looks like it averages a few inches.

We're looking at the potential for another inch or two tonight, along with some ice.  I guess we're due, because the snow cover is down to an inch or less.  Before long, we'll be seeing green again, first on the grass, then on the leaves.  But for now, I guess I can deal with just a little more snow.

Historical Snow Cover Maps

Last of the Bitter Days this Winter?

 I'm hoping that this week was the end of the worst.  Of winter, that is.  It was pretty frigid from Wednesday into Thursday, with Thursday being the coldest day of the week.  At Cornell's Game Farm Road weather station, the temperature hovered around 15F for most of Thursday morning, after falling from the upper teens overnight - it was 19 at midnight.  The temperature climbed just a little bit on Thursday afternoon, up to 18 degrees.  Meanwhile, we had light snow showers and flurries for much of the day: lake effect snow under breezy winds from the northwest.  In all, we picked up maybe half an inch of very light, fluffy snow.  With the breeze, the wind chill was in the single digits all day.  At the Ithaca airport, it was just a bit warmer, with a temperature climbing into the lower 20s for much of the afternoon.  

Looking ahead to the coming days, we're into a warmer period.  With each hour today, we get a little closer to the freezing mark (or should I say melting mark?)  Today through next week, we're looking at highs in the mid-30s to lower 40s...warm enough for me to maybe visit somewhere outside for the blog.  We have a storm that looks to be passing well to our east over the weekend, though we may see just a little snow from it as well.  And before long, we'll be into March!  The Climate Prediction Center issued a March forecast today expecting above-normal temperatures for the eastern half of the country.  Let's hope that it proves to be true!

Photo Series: More Images from the Snowstorm

Snowstorm Names

You may have noticed that when I referred to this weekend's snowstorm, I didn't use the name that has been popularly ascribed to it.  The Weather Channel has taken it upon themselves to name storms this year, and I don't agree with their methods.  Most of my arguments are stated pretty clearly in the article below.  In short, I find the naming thing to be more of a publicity stunt than a legitimate effort to aid the scientific community and the public.  I do agree that major winter storms would be easier to remember if they had catchy names rather than "Superstorm of 1993" and "Blizzard of 1996".  But I think the naming convention needs more study rather than flippantly choosing names and selecting random criteria for when to apply them.  It's a problem that could use the input of social scientists, much like the way that the research project that I've recently proposed, involving a team of scientists and social scientists, proposes to integrate social science as a guide to direct more fundamental scientific research.  If you have a couple minutes, please check out the article link to read more about how meteorologists feel about the naming of winter storms.

Finding Nemo Article

The Majesty of a February Snowstorm

I'd like to invite you into a magical experience of a winter's night. I encourage you to look at each photo for at least a few seconds before reading the text that follows...I think you'll enjoy what I've written more if you take some time to take in the scene as well.

Yesterday I posted about the February 8-9 2013 blizzard from a more analytical point of view, looking at the storm through my meteorologist's lens. Today, though, it's a more personal look at the storm and my experience of it.  I knew that the snow would be winding down late Friday night, so I decided to wait until late to go outside and shovel.  There's something magical about being outside, alone, in a freshly fallen snow.  My original plan was to somewhat quickly shovel about half of the driveway, snap some shots for the blog, and leave the rest for Saturday.  But this was while my view of the night and its power was still blurry.

After a little while outside though, I realized that I wasn't getting cold, and I decided to take my time and bask in the glory of a late-night dwindling snowstorm.  It was still snowing a little bit, but I could certainly get away with shoveling it all now and not having to do another round the next morning.  My vision - not my eyesight, my vision - began to clear.  I could see the value of enjoying the moment, of taking in the sights, sounds, and thoughts of a quiet winter's night.  And a whole new world opened to me.

I looked back at my house, where I still have some holiday lights on.  (The kitchen light was streaming through a side window, too.)  I remembered why I've left the lights on.  It was to help me to get through the long, cold, dark winter.  Yes, the winter is still cold, and it's certainly been dragging on long enough.  But I can see that the sunsets are slowly getting later, the days are getting longer, and the sun is peeking through the clouds a little more frequently.  Today, a couple of days in the wake of the storm, was a rare sunny day in Freeville. 

By now, the roads were in fairly good shape, covered with a thin, packed coating of snow that provided some traction.  For the whole hour-plus that I was outside, I didn't see a single plow.  Well, I didn't see a single MUNICIPAL plow...there were a couple of private trucks with plows on the front that were either going from one job to the next or headed home after a long evening of clearing parking lots.  I only saw a few cars going by while I was out there...certainly less than on a typical Friday night.  Normally, I get a bit upset when people come flying through Freeville, but it didn't bother me one bit to see a truck hitting the pedal a bit too hard on this night.  It was strange: because it was so quiet, I felt a connectedness with the folks whizzing by and even timidly flashed a quick wave at a couple of the folks driving past.

But the whole reason that I was outside was to clear the driveway.  And as I usually am when I have a task to do that I don't particularly want to do, I was methodical about it.  I started by clearing a path on each side of the driveway, so that I could easily push strips of snow from one side to the other.  I worked my way from the street towards the car.  I would normally park out by the street so that I only need to clear by the car and fashion myself a path from the front door to the car...this would give me as much time as I want to shovel out the rest of the driveway.   But I didn't do that this time, and it allowed me to experience more of the snowstorm.  By the way, most of these photos are re-touched.  The originals were pretty terrible, and I had to adjust the brightness and contrast.  For this one, I also put it in grayscale to take out the yellow-orange afterglow of the streetlights.  Snow should look white, right?

There's a bit of a mystery for me here in Freeville.  Well, if you've been reading the blog for a while, you probably know that there are quite a few mysteries for me here in Freeville.  But the one I'm referring to now is the one in this picture.  After every snowstorm, the Great Snowblower of Freeville ventures out into the elements and clears Freeville's sidewalks of snow.  At first, I thought it was whoever clears the post office's sidewalks being nice and clearing a few neighboring sidewalks.  But no, it's both sides of the street, for as far as I could see last night.  So to the Great Snowblower of Freeville: I have no idea who you are, but thank you.

One of the nice things about this snow was that it wasn't too heavy.  The convenient thing about this is that it was fairly easy to push and lift the snow with my shovel.  Even though we had about 8.5" on the ground, it was fairly easy work.  Because the snow was dry and fluffy, though, I had to abort my attempt to build a snowman on Saturday night, and fairly quickly (because I wasn't getting anywhere).  And on Friday night, when I was shoveling, I couldn't secure my shovel in the snow by the side of the driveway.  In the photo above, I had stuck the shovel in the snow but had to quickly pull it up before it toppled over.

But out in the pile of snow left by the Great Snowblower of Freeville, the snow was deep and dense enough to secure my shovel.

It's funny how your experience of things in the moment and your memory of them after the fact are usually pretty different.  In this photo, I've pretty blatantly changed the color scheme, so that what was once a yellowish-orange tinge is now a cool, pale blue.  But if you hadn't seen the other photos, you could easily believe that this was the way it looked, yes?  In fact, as I was re-touching this photo, I thought that this looked "right"...for a moment there, my memory of the colors of the actual experience - and the photos I'd been working on - was completely lost.

But here's the mailbox in "true color".  The photo's only been retouched for contrast and brightness, because the original was a bit dim.  Pretty easy to tell which way the wind was blowing, yes?

One of the other mysteries of the night for me were these small "footprints" in the snow.  I knew they weren't actually footprints.  I've seen bare paths in the snow-covered grass at Cornell above underground heating pipes, and I wondered if these little depressions might have been caused by something similar.  But a stirring of the air led me to the only possible conclusion - these were the footprints of the wind.

Perhaps the greatest irony of the night for me was that I was outside in this tremendous snowstorm, and yet for much of that time, there was little to no wind.  Of course, I knew that I was far from the roiling center of the storm offshore of New England...but it was still strange to be amid such a peaceful setting when I knew that nature's fury was boiling over only a few hundred miles away.  There were times, though, when gusts of wind blew through.  I could hear them rustling through the trees; I could see them knocking little snowballs off of the branches and power lines, making footprints where they landed in the snow; and I could, at times, feel the powder whipping against my face as the flakes were brushed off the branches by a gentler breeze.

Once I started paying attention to the wind, it seemed to be almost toying with me (and the flag at the post office)...perfectly calm one instant...but flaring up quickly in the next.

By this point, my mind - like the snow when a gust came along - was blown.  But in a good way.  I was feeling appreciation for the beauty of the snow, for the mystery of the wind, for the experience of a winter's night.  I felt a connectedness with it all, much like the intertwining snow-covered branches of the trees.

At one point, a van approached, but instead of continuing on down the road, it stopped in front of the bus station.  I had an idea of what the man (or woman) in the van was up to, but a little later, I wanted to be sure...

Yup, it was the delivery of Saturday's Ithaca Journal.  I'm sure the snowstorm was front page news!

I wandered back home knowing that I was done my share of cleaning up from the storm, but also knowing that plenty of folks out there had more work to do.   Here in Freeville, the parking lot at the post office still had to be plowed.

Before I headed inside, I took in my freshly cleared driveway and the sights and sounds of a majestic snowstorm's night...just one more time.

February 2013 Nor'easter: A Meteorologist's View

The blizzard of February 8-9 2013 will be remembered differently depending on where it was experienced.  My many friends in the Philadelphia region saw it largely as an over-hyped dud, with just a few inches of snow that fell mostly overnight, barely affecting their lives.  But for some of my friends in Connecticut and Massachusetts, who are faced with snow drifts up to three or four feet - and I've seen pictures of drifts up to five feet - it's a storm that they'll spend hours digging out of, a storm that they'll remember for a long time.

Here in central New York, it was just another winter snowstorm, as nor'easters typically are for us.  We tend to be on the fringe of the storm (as we were with this one), so we tend to avoid the strongest winds and the heaviest snowbands.  In this post, I'll share some images of the storm from a meteorologist's point of view, and tomorrow, I'll be sharing some of my own photos and experiences of the storm. 


The above image, and the few like it that follow, was produced by a meteorological model.  I'll probably post more extensively on these models at some point in the future, but for now, you should just know that models are the key to the improvements in forecasting over the past few decades.  Forecasters rely on a combination of models, current and past observations of atmospheric conditions, and their own past experience and insights to put together a forecast.  These images all show simulated (or predicted) radar reflectivity: the bluer colors show lighter precipitation (pretty much all snow for this storm), and the yellow-to-orange colors show heavier precipitation.  The green colors represent moderate precipitation.  The above image is for 1:00 pm local time on Friday.



These images are all three hours apart, so this one shows the same thing as above - radar reflectivity - except three hours later.  Can you see how the storm is evolving?  In the first image, there were two relatively distinct areas of green, one pivoting around the eastern Great Lakes (Lake Ontario and Lake Erie) and the other has the highest precipitation intensity off of the southern Delaware coast.  In the image here, the first area is sliding to the east, while the second area is working its way north.  The coastal storm - the nor'easter - is the stronger of the two, and eventually the energy of the weaker storm coming from the Great Lakes will be absorbed into the coastal storm, making it that much stronger.


Here we are three hours later, and now it's much harder to tell that this was originally two storms.  The coastal storm has strengthened, for a number of reasons - which I won't get into here, because they aren't apparent in this image.  But what is apparent in this image is the greater intensity of the snow, which you can see in the ribbon of orange extending across parts of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Connecticut.  Snowstorms tend to form bands of heavier snow, and you can see that the model is simulating a couple of bands: the stripes of orange and yellow.  There's also a weaker north-to-south band of darker green extending across central New York, right along the Interstate 81 corridor...this is a little bit east of Freeville.


Now we're getting into Friday night - 10 pm to be exact - and snowfall is expected to be kicking in for my friends in the Philadelphia area.  Meanwhile, the heavier snow in New York State is slowly migrating east, and the band that had been over southern New England a few hours ago is slowly migrating north.  Overall, the snow is in one continuous shield extending from western New York, south to southern New Jersey, north to southern Maine, and east well out into the Atlantic Ocean, where winds are certainly howling by this point.  According to the model, this is about when the storm, as a whole, was expected to be at its peak.

Three hours later, at 1:00 am, when most have gone to bed but the weather weenies are still awake following the storm, it continues to slide off to the northeast.  Nor'easters, by the way, are named for the winds that blow from the northeast when the storm is off the coast.  You can see this, in a roundabout way, in the north-northeast-to-south-southwest orientation of the thin orange snowband around the Boston area in this image.  Here in central New York, as well as for my friends in the Philadelphia area, the storm was expected to be winding down by now, though it is still raging over much of New England.


And finally, at 4 am, central New York is cleared of the snow (the blue colors indicate snow that isn't reaching the ground or possibly flurries), while the heaviest snow is slowly exiting New England.  The model expected the heaviest snow, overall, to fall around the Boston area, with quite a bit for parts of southern New England - Connecticut, Rhode Island, southeastern Massachusetts - as well.


Here's a picture that I nabbed off of Facebook from a friend who works for the National Weather Service office in Gray, ME (near Portland).  NWS employees know how to prepare for this kind of weather - the offices usually have extra staffing, and they may well have to spend the night.



Here's a forecast graphic provided by the Binghamton NWS office on Friday morning.  Notice how the map shows the two storms converging - the western storm is sliding from the western edge of the map toward the east, and the eastern storm will be growing in intensity and size as it slides roughly from south to north, so snow also moves from the eastern edge of the map towards the center.


A few hours later, in the early afternoon, they provided an update to the earlier graphic.  You can see some updates to the map, but perhaps more importantly, they've better pinned down the timing of the snowfall, as you can see in the text to the left.  Now that the storm is in progress, the forecasters can see how well reality is (or isn't) matching the models, and they can better pin down the timing and locations where they expect the heaviest snow.    To me, the bottom point is most important.  During snowstorms, it's not the total snowfall that's most important, but the snowfall rates - how fast the snow is falling....where and when.  If it falls too fast, the plows can't keep up.


I've got a couple of radar images here, just to show some differences between the model and reality.  You can see that the real radar is a lot "messier" than the model radar.  This is partly because the real radar shows a pixel - a point - every 1 km, while the model's pixel is much larger (I don't know exactly what it was, though).  This image is from 8:38 am local time, before any of the model images above, but you can still clearly see the two storms.


Here's the radar a few hours later, as of 12:18 pm local time.  The storms are moving ever so slightly closer together.  Going back to my point from above, another reason that model isn't as messy as reality is that it's designed to be that way.  Models can't calculate the movement of every molecule in the air, so they have to assume that the air over a certain "box "- anywhere from 1 km to 32 km or more - is more or less constant.  The models calculate the interactions between adjacent boxes, and they use approximations to simulate the processes that happen on smaller scales, within the box.  The result of this is that the model tends to smooth things out.  Just compare the yellow bands in this image to the yellow bands in the model-simulated radar above.  There's a lot more variation in color within the bands, and their edges are more ragged.  The models can simulate this kind of complexity, but for a storm like this, it's more important to focus on the bigger picture, so it's ok that the model looks smoother.


Here's the snowfall forecast from NWS Binghamton from 4 am on Friday.  For Ithaca, Freeville, and most of Tompkins county, we were expected to pick up about 6-8" from the storm, most of it coming late afternoon Friday through about 1 am Saturday.  Because the eastern storm was expected to ramp up in intensity and become dominant, the snowfall forecast increased from west to east.


Here's another picture I shamelessly grabbed from Facebook.  The caption: "Impressive features developing from the rapidly intensifying Nor'easter. The pressure has dropped 27.5 mb in less than 10 hours which classifies as bombogenesis. These look like gravity waves or internal atmospheric waves of some kind."  This happened early in the storm, when it was located off the coast near the Virginia/North Carolina border...well before it impacted New England.  It was originally posted by Brad Panovich, aTV meteorologist in Charlotte, NC.  

"Bombogenesis" is a rapid intensification of a storm.  It happens occasionally in really strong nor'easters, and it can result in some really high snowfall rates, lots of wind (there was a gust reported at Boston's Logan Airport of, I believe, 76 mph), and some really miserable people (as well as some very excited weather weenies).  Models, if they're running at high enough resolution (that is, with "boxes" small enough), can produce features like the gravity waves pointed out in this image, but the value is more in showing that they're possible, rather than making meteorologists overly concerned with their exact location and timing. 


And finally, now that you've probably had more than your fill of meteorology for one day, here's a look at some snowfall totals from the storm.  Guess whose snowfall report from 12:50 am was included in the list?


And here are some more snowfall totals!


In case you like maps better than numbers, here's a map of observed snowfall totals, from the Gray, ME NWS office.  You can see that the heaviest snowband set up just inland of the coast across southern Maine, then bent over towards central Massachusetts.  The heaviest snows from the storm, though, were in central Connecticut, where snowfall rates peaked around a ridiculous 6 inches per hour...I don't think the plows had any chance of keeping up with that!

...TOMPKINS COUNTY...
   GROTON                 9.8   715 AM  2/09  TRAINED SPOTTER
   ETNA                   9.5   430 AM  2/09  FACEBOOK
   DRYDEN                 9.0   730 AM  2/09  NWS FACEBOOK
   FREEVILLE              8.5   208 AM  2/09  FACEBOOK
   LANSING                8.2   800 AM  2/09  NWS FACEBOOK
   3 N FREEVILLE          8.0   740 AM  2/09  COCORAHS
   CAROLINE CENTER        7.3   732 AM  2/09  TRAINED SPOTTER
   DANBY                  6.8   819 AM  2/09  2.3 SINCE LAST EVE
   ITHACA                 5.5   930 AM  2/09  TRAINED SPOTTER

And finally, closer to home, here's a look at snowfall totals across the county. It snowed the most in the northeastern part of the county - Groton is 5.5 miles north of Freeville, Etna is a couple of 

miles south, and Dryden a couple of miles east. It snowed less in the southern part of the county (Caroline, Danby), but it snowed least in Ithaca, where the elevation is lowest. Elevation often has a big impact on snow totals, with higher elevations usually seeing more and lower elevations seeing less.

I hope you've enjoyed this look at the storm...come back tomorrow for photos from Freeville and a completely different perspective.