Posts Tagged ‘weather’
“We are but dust and shadow”*…
On the 14th day of April of 1935,
There struck the worst of dust storms that ever filled the sky.
You could see that dust storm comin’, the cloud looked deathlike black,
And through our mighty nation, it left a dreadful track.
From Oklahoma City to the Arizona line,
Dakota and Nebraska to the lazy Rio Grande,
It fell across our city like a curtain of black rolled down,
We thought it was our judgement, we thought it was our doom.
— Woodie Guthrie, ‘Great Dust Storm’
March had seen ‘dusters’ every day for thirty days straight; in Dodge City, Kansas, there’d been only thirteen dust-free days so far that year.
Yet on that second Sunday in April, the morning dawned bright, sunny and clear. In the farms of the Oklahoma Panhandle, families opened up their front doors and breathed in deep. It was Palm Sunday, a week before Easter, and people hoped God was in a forgiving mood.
They opened up their homes, and started to clean. Wet sheets and blankets and gunnysacks put up to catch the dust could be taken down; the tape and flour-paste strips sealing up windows and doors peeled off, and windows thrown open wide. Dust got swept and scooped out of the home by the bucket-load; roofs were shovelled before they collapsed under the weight of it; bedlinen and towels and clothing washed, and hung up in the sun to dry. People went to church – the Methodist Church in Guymon, Oklahoma held a ‘rain service’, the congregation praying for divine intervention to bring much-needed moisture. In Boise City they resumed plans for a rabbit drive, delayed a month by the dust storms. Elsewhere, families walked out to inspect their farms, the outhouses buried, the ceilings fallen in, new dunes nine and ten feet high, piled up against the fences.
It was the best day of the year so far, temperatures in the 80s – shirtsleeve weather. In Springfield, Colorado, Ike Osteen cleared out his Model-A Ford, filed down the burnt spots on the distributor, got the engine to fire, and drove out to pick up his friends Tex and Pearl Glover.
That same morning the sky turned purple and the winds rose, eight hundred miles to the north near Bismark, North Dakota. The temperature dropped 30 degrees as the winds picked up and blew south and south-southwest, forty miles per hour then sixty five miles per hour over South Dakota, Nebraska, and into Kansas, picking up the dry, dry dirt from the exhausted land into a roiling mass of darkness 2,000 feet high. At 2.30pm, Dodge City blacked out, the air too choked with earth for car headlights to let you even see your hand in front of your face.
The stormfront rolled on southward, picking up more dust and dirt and power as it went…
More at “Black Sunday,” an entry at Disturbances, a fascinating newsletter by Jay Owens (@hautepop) devoted entirely to dust.
For even more, watch Ken Burn’s The Dust Bowl, and/or read the accompanying book.
* Horace
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As we cover our faces, we might recall that it was on this date in 1962 that “The Ash Wednesday Storm” hit the the east coast of the U.S. Also known as the Great March Storm of 1962, it was one of the most destructive storms ever to affect the mid-Atlantic states– one of the ten worst storms in the United States in the 20th century. It lingered through five high tides over a three-day period, killing 40 people, injuring over 1,000, and causing hundreds of millions in property damage in six states, from North Carolina to Maine, and deposited significant snowfall over the Southeast.
U.S. Army Corps of Engineers photo of damage at Virginia Beach, Virginia
“Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing”*…
If you’re planning to relocate but want to live somewhere with a near-exact temperature profile, where should you go?
That depends: Folks in San Francisco might choose San Luis Obispo 200 miles south, or Portugal’s Cabo Carvoeiro 5,600 miles east, as these locales have 99 percent similar monthly temperatures. Chicagoans could go to Ottawa or Dalian, China, whereas New Yorkers will feel at home in Dover, Maryland; Milford, Delaware; or Makhachkala, Russia.
That’s according to an engrossing map tool from Codeminders that compares places with equivalent climates…
More at “A Guide to Finding Cities With Nearly Identical Temperatures“– and try it for yourself here.
* “Pray don’t talk to me about the weather, Mr. Worthing. Whenever people talk to me about the weather, I always feel quite certain that they mean something else. And that makes me quite nervous.”
– Oscar Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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As we ponder the differential impacts of climate change, we might recall that it was on this date in 1900 that a massive storm spread record snows from Kansas to New York State. Snowfall totals ranged up to 17.5 inches at Springfield IL and 43 inches at Rochester NY, with up to 60 inches in the Adirondack Mountains of New York State.
Central Park, after the storm
“There is one spectacle grander than the sea, that is the sky”*…
click here for zoomable version
In between Earth and space lies an ocean of air. That “great aerial ocean,” as biologist Alfred Russel Wallace (the other natural selection guy) called it, is an extremely thin envelope of gas and suspended particles that encompass our planet. To get perspective on just how thin, there’s this very rough equivalency: The atmosphere is to the Earth as an onion’s wafer thin outer skin is to an onion. But while it may be just a sliver, it’s critical to life on Earth.
Without our atmosphere, there wouldn’t be rain for our plants and vegetables to grow—and feed us. There’d be no greenhouse effect keeping the planet temperate enough to sustain life. There’d be no talking or music-playing because sound wouldn’t exist as we know it—without a medium like air, sound waves can’t travel and thus don’t create vibrations that hit our eardrums allowing us to hear. And there wouldn’t be the oxygen we need to breathe. Bottom line, without it, life on Earth would be nada…
More on the extraordinary envelope that surrounds our planet at World Science Festival’s “Rethink Science.”
* Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
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As we take stock of what we take for granted, we might send sunny birthday greetings to Alexander Buchan; he was born on this date in 1829. A Scottish meteorologist, oceanographer and botanist, he is credited with establishing the weather map as the basis of weather forecasting (after tracing the path of a storm from North America, across the Atlantic, into northern Europe in 1868).
“I believe alien life is quite common in the universe, although intelligent life is less so. Some say it has yet to appear on planet Earth”*…
If the range of habitable radii is sufficiently broad, most inhabited planets are likely to be closer in size to Mars than the Earth. Furthermore, since population density is widely observed to decline with increasing body mass, we conclude that most intelligent species are expected to exceed 300kg…
From the summary of University of Barcelona cosmologist Fergus Simpson‘s paper, “The Nature of Inhabited Planets and their Inhabitants” (which can be downloaded as a PDF here).
* Stephen Hawking
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As we phone home, we might recall that it was on this date in 1960 that the first weather satellite, TIROS I, was launched from Cape Kennedy (or Canaveral, as then it was) and sent back the first television pictures from space. The first in a long series of launches in the TIROS program (Television Infrared Observation Satellite), it was NASA’s initial step, at a time when the effectiveness of satellite observations was still unproven, in determining if satellites could be useful in the study of the Earth. In the event, TIROS I and it successors proved extremely useful in weather forecasting.
TIROS I prototype at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum
“Getting struck by lightning is like winning the lottery, except of course, not as lucky”*…
On the coast of Venezuela, in the small fishing village of Ologa, lies a square kilometer that is struck by more lightning than anywhere else on the planet almost every other night of the year. Reuter’s photojournalist Jorge Silva offers an illustrated tour at “Venezuela’s eternal storm.”
* Jarod Kintz
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As we take cover, we might send highly-charged birthday greetings to Alessandro Giuseppe Antonio Anastasio Volta; he was born on this date in 1745. Volta was a physicist who studied what we now call electrical capacitance; he developed (separate) means to study both electrical potential (V ) and charge (Q ), and discovered that for a given object, they are proportional. This is often called “Volta’s Law”; the unit of electrical potential is universally called the “volt.” For all of this, Volta may be best remembered as the inventor of the first battery (which he called the “voltaic pile“).
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