Your Boring or Dramatic Weather?

digitS'

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You can all talk about dramatic weather events, I'm sure. On the 19th, we can celebrate the anniversary of a local weather event "Ice Storm '96" when trees fell and some parts of this region were without power for 3 weeks :(.

Lots of folks, in every part of the country I've lived in or visited, have told me that, "If you don't like the weather, wait an hour!" It can't be that the whole continent is like that but I know what they mean. I will say one thing, "If you don't like the weather in Colorado, wait an hour!" Dramatic weather swings in a place like Colorado has a lot to do with a Mountain Climate. Trust me on that if you haven't experienced it :p.

Here at home, we are backed up to the Rockies, at the edge of the Columbia Basin Desert, geograpically referred to often as a part of the Pacific Northwest. I suppose that I've always lived in the Pacific Northwest despite having lived from south of San Francisco to very near 49 north latitude. I want to tell you, you want consistent weather, move to the PNW :rolleyes:.

Oh yeah, an ocean squall can move in and and spoil a sunny morning :cool:. But, I'm talking about mind-numbing WEEKS of overcast skies and rain, rain, rain. But, I don't live there . . . . . . ;)

No, I live where you can fry for MONTHS with 16 hours a day sunshine! I live in the Interior of the Wild, Wild West. You know, the fly-over part of the nation.

Still, the mind-numbing quality of MONTHS of blazing sun is there. Then, we can turn that into snow that falls in November . . . and never melt until March!! Leaden skies, day after day to break up our nights of 16 hours of darkness!! Cripes, with that kind of weather in mid-November, we begin to lose daylight at 2:30 in the afternoon :rolleyes:!

The only important "weather feature" we've experienced lately is the persistence of cloud cover. That and the consistant yammering of the weather guy, day after day, telling us that it is "going to rain," "going to rain," "going to rain." We've had rain, oh yeah, twice all of 1/10th of an inch fell.

This morning was a little different. As best as I remember, the TV weather numbskull completely missed it in his forecast: Gusts to 35mp and the warmest temperature for the entire month - in the dark, at 6am this morning :D!

Now, hitting 57 isn't a very big deal . . . and I don't suppose that this even counts as a "Chinook Wind" which is a truly dramatic weather event if'n it shows up when we have 2 feet of snow on the ground in January :hit (closest I could come to a "Drowning Smilie Guy" ;)).

And, it isn't here that a "Chinook" can really, really turn the world around. Here's what Wikipedia says about a Chinook in Loma Montana, just on the other side of these Rocky Mountains (I'll add some bold emphasis): "Loma, Montana boasts as having the most extreme recorded temperature change in a 24-hour period. On January 15, 1972, the temperature rose from −54 F (-48 C) to 49 F (9 C), a 103 F (57 C) change in temperature; a dramatic example of the regional Chinook wind in action."

:gig

Excuse me, I think that 3 weeks of Boring as HE-double Hockey Sticks weather has caused me to finally lose my mind :/! After today, the weather forecast is: back to more of the same . . . . . .

Steve
 

jojo54

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We just finished a rainfall warning. It rained all day yesterday, all night and finally stopped this morning. We had a couple of inches which is very unusual for here at one stretch. We sure need the rain after the dry summer and all the forest fires we had. :weee
(Lillooet was actually evacuated for almost a week this past summer - not fun) :hide

The rain didn't stop my chickens from going out (I let them loose in the whole back yard until spring to eat weed seeds, insect eggs, etc.) but they looked like drowned rats with muddy feet and beaks. I tried to get a pic but they wouldn't stand still and the light wasn't good enough. :idunno
 

digitS'

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JoJo, I noticed that the storms keep sliding north, north, north. I can usually get an idea of what the weather will do in 12 hours by looking at Portland but nothing quite gets here and what's coming must be heading up from Sacramento!

There is one hen that's molting - she went broody while the others were molting a couple months ago. Olivia looks like the Wreck of the Hesperus and has feathers all over the backyard.

With all the wind, the feathers are probably blowing over into the neighbor's yard. He won't like that. He mowed his postage stamp front lawn, Sunday. I couldn't see that it had grown any in the last month but . . . DW said, "Why is he starting his lawnmower?"

I said that maybe it was because his fingernail clippers are in the shop ;).

Anyway, Olivia hasn't come out of the coop this morning. She's in the nestbox. Looks like an exploded feather pillow but she's planning on laying an egg.

Steve
PS, I knew about your evacuations a couple months ago. No, it didn't look fun . . . good luck with the rain.
 

Lavender2

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This past June my son moved to Wiley, a teenie town in CO.
He has already let me know that the weather back home is boring... :lol:
However he did not use the words 'dramatic' or 'exciting' when describing his six hour slow trek through a snowstorm at night to get from Denver to his home!...eeek!

Other than an occasional record breaking blizzard or sub-zero days that turn into weeks (unexpectedly :rolleyes:) ... OR the freak tornado that came out of nowhere and hit downtown Minneapolis last summer... yes, our weather is on average, pretty boring...

At the moment, boring is a good thing! A bit chilly nights, but sunny days... sweatshirt weather if you are a native... parka and gloves if you are visiting from the south... :cool: ........:coolsun

Hi hopes the snow will hold off until after Thanksgiving! ....:fl
 

ducks4you

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BTW, digitS', there are numerous historic accounts of up and down North American weather, written by Europeans over the last few centuries. Beginning with Jamestown they were amazed at how volitile our weather is here. I was gonna post about "The St. Valentine's Day Ice Storm," winter of 1991 (I think) where folks in the country lost power for up to 2 weeks, But, instead, I thought everyone might be interested in some weather history.
Read Below---
http://www.britannica.com/blogs/2009/02/february-1899-the-worst-cold-snap-in-north-american-history/

http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/elements/arcticoutbreak.htm
Central Illinois: On December 20, 1836, an arctic outbreak struck Illinois that would go down in the memories of many Illinois residents as The Sudden Change Day, Cold Tuesday and The Cold Day in Illinois. At 2 pm, the thermometer in Augusta had recorded a drop from 40 oF (4.4 oC) to 0 oF (-18 oC) in less than 8 hours. Not quite as deep a fall as the previous events, but the impact on the population of Illinois was memorable. (For a more detailed account, see my story Illinois' Sudden Change of 1836.)

http://www.islandnet.com/~see/weather/events/ilsuddenchange.htm
Here are some colorful quotes:
Martin Rinehart of Champagne County remembers: "It began to rain and continued all day, when suddenly it turned intensely cold, making ice over the ground and freezing very hard. The sudden change caught many persons unprepared, and they were frozen to death. Two men named Hildreth and Frame were crossing Four Mile Prairie on that day. They became bewildered and lost their way when the change came. They killed their horses, and Frame crawled inside the body of his horse for protection against the cold, but it proved his tomb, as he was found therein frozen to death. Hildreth wandered around all night and when found in the morning he was so badly frozen, that he lost his toes and fingers."

George Price of McLean County thought the mercury must have fallen from forty degrees above zero to twenty degrees below in less than fifteen minutes. By the time Mr. Price could run two hundred yards to his house the slush was so frozen that it bore his weight. The change was so sudden and severe that some geese, which had been playing in a nearby field, had the points of their wings frozen in the ice, and it was necessary to cut them free.

Kinda makes our super wet year pale by comparison.
 

vfem

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It was warm and fantastic all weekend, and Monday... now it is dreary and cold. I would be bummed out but I have a new cookware set and on cold days I LOVE to cook and bake. So I'm at the stove working my rear off on some stock and soon will add hashbrowns!
 

DrakeMaiden

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We just got done with an intense series of storms. High winds and lots of rain. I think we got 2 inches of rain one day and then 3 inches the next. I had standing water in my yard where I have never seen standing water before. Two nights in a row, I was awake in the middle of the night wondering if our house was going to blow away, or apart. I was looking out the window at the trees, which were getting whipped all about. The wind sounded like a freight train going by the outside of our house. At one point, it sounded like a freight train with a long row of cars . . . it just kept blowing and blowing and blowing at high intensity, like a torrential river of wind.
 

digitS'

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DrakeMaiden, how come you are keeping all that rain over there? Yesterday afternoon, we got our customary "sprinkle" but instead of rain, it was mud . . .

I think it may have rained last night. We went for a drive south trying to find some sunshine (found a little :cool:). There was a little moisture on the pavement in shady areas.

I might have gained 7 pounds this month! My DW is cooking up a storm nearly every day. Too much bad, uninspiring weather will be to my undoing!! Right now, it's just the top button . . .

See, I don't really know about tornadoes. This is just the wrong place for tornadoes to develop. Strong wind - yep, I got an idea about that especially from having once lived only about a mile from the Pacific Ocean . . . . .

Sudden, plunging chills would be dangerous!!

I'm still thinking about what it would mean to gain 103 degrees in 24 hours. If it hadn't been so terribly, terribly cold in Loma before that Chinook showed up and if we didn't have this awkward Fahrenheit scale . . .

Just to keep it all on one side of zero: That historic event would be equivalent to going in the house one cold afternoon with the thermometer down at 0; the next day dawns bright and sunny and the thermometer tops out at 103 that afternoon !!! Can you imagine??

Steve ;)
 

DrakeMaiden

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I don't know, Steve, I think it is pretty crazy when we have gone from about freezing to 70 or 80 degrees F in one day. That is enough weather drama for me!

Why are we hoarding the rain? Well, because our aquifers took a big hit this summer. So . . . :plbb ;)

Not like you have anything to complain about . . . sounds like you are well fed these days. :)
 

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