Re: Critical Mass
- From: "Patricia C. Wrede" <pwrede6492@xxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 1 Sep 2005 20:03:19 -0500
"Mary K. Kuhner" <mkkuhner@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:df8428$vov$1@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> In article <11hf3gpn82rkac4@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>,
> Patricia C. Wrede <pwrede6492@xxxxxxx> wrote:
> It's not temperature and precipitation I find myself needing, though.
> The one time I was on the Great Plains, in Alberta, we saw a thunderstorm
> coming at us like a wall the length of the world, perfectly straight,
> blue sky everywhere else. I initially didn't understand what it was,
> because Seattle thunderstorms are big round blobs of storm. (Or little
> round blobs of storm. I heard thunder close by one day, but outside my
> window was blue sky and sun. Looked out the other windows--same thing.
> Then I went outside and looked up. There it was, straight overhead,
> sitting on my house like the fist of doom.)
That's more common to the west of us, but I don't know if it's because the
city itself creates a micro-climate or if we're just a hair too far east to
get that kind of dramatic difference or if it's just that you don't *see* it
because there are too many buildings. I do know that we seldom get
tornadoes in or near the center city; the outlying suburbs get hit now and
then, but supposedly the vast acres of concrete and skyscrapers disrupt air
flow in ways that mostly push tornadoes off in some other direction. We had
one in the late 70s that cut a fair swath through south Minneapolis, but I
don't think there's been one since then that actually made it past the ring
of suburbs. We've had some freak high-velocity straight-line winds a couple
of times in the past 20 years or so -- the last time, they took down around
200 mature trees -- but they're not common and don't last much longer than a
tornado (about half an hour, at most).
> Also, we don't have eye storms, we have wave storms: storm like crazy,
> lull, storm like crazy, lull, over and over with no reverse in wind
> direction.
It took me a minute to figure out what you meant by eye storms; we don't
really have those, either. We get storms when a front moves through,
usually, which means it's heading in some direction fairly steadily; if it's
the right sort of front, we get a nice, steady, soaking rain, and if it
isn't, we get variations on storm-and-lull. Oh, and in high summer
(July-August), we often get "thunderstorms redeveloping" in the afternoon --
meaning, it rained a bit last night, the sun came out and dried out the
clouds and then evaporated enough of the moisture that by mid-to-late
afternoon, there are thunderstorms again. Those can come and go in a couple
of hours.
The sort of thunderstorms that are on the leading edge of a frontal system
usually mean a fairly significant drop in temperature after they've passed
through -- it can be 90 in the morning and in the 70s after the storms have
passed. This doesn't usually last more than a day or so, in high summer; in
the fall, it can last the better part of a week. The sort of thunderstorms
that redevelop in the afternoon don't have this effect, or at least, not
nearly so dramatically -- things cool off a bit because the sun isn't
shining and it's raining, but as soon as the rain is over, if it's still
sunny (which it usually is, in July), everything turns into a steambath.
>
> How much micro-climate do you have?
There are patches along the Mississippi that are Zone 5, when most of the
rest of the Twin Cities are Zone 4/3, but it's not the sort of thing you'd
probably notice if you weren't a gardener.
> Do you ever get up in the morning
> to find half the city has snow and the other half doesn't?
Not usually, though it is fairly common to find that part of the city has
had half an inch or two inches and some other parts have five or six inches.
Usually when that happens, it sort of tapers from one depth to the other,
and it's usually because the center of a big blizzard missed us and we just
caught the edge.
> Does it
> rain only on one side of the street? I've heard we are unusual in that
> regard.
About a month ago, we had heavy rain in the downtown and northern suburbs,
but it was bone-dry where I live (in the southwest suburbs). That's pretty
uncommon, and the dividing line wasn't sharp. Every once in a while in the
summer, we do get "scattered showers," which usually means that it's
overcast, but it's only actually raining in patches, but when that happens,
it's usually "misting" or drizzling as you get nearer to the rainy patches,
and they're usually moving around enough that they hit most of everything.
>
> This kind of thing is hard to get from guidebooks. Does the fog come
> in the morning or the evening?
Morning, usually, when there is some. Mostly, there isn't. And when there
*is* fog, it's usually along the rivers and other low-lying areas, where it
screws up traffic, or else kind of hovering over the lakes and marshes in
wisps, looking cool. I think there's too much air movement for there to be
a lot of fog on a regular basis; also, the day/night temperature shifts
don't tend to favor it, IIRC. I think we get redeveloping thunderstorms
instead.
> Can you ever be frying in fog? (Felt
> that for the first time in my life this summer, on Cape Cod. Nasty!
> It was thickly foggy at ground level but very shallow, with blazing
> sun above. Searing white calm.)
I've never seen that here; I'd be quite surprised if it happened. Usually,
if there's morning fog, it burns off well before the sun is high enough to
be blazing overhead. We have a lot of lakes, but not enough to generate the
kind of evaporation it'd take to maintain fog while the daytime temperature
is rising; also, there's usually a breeze.
>Does the fog melt away, climb up,
> sink down?
"Burns off" is the usual term here, and it's almost always gone by, oh, 9
a.m. Evening fog happens sometimes, but I think it usually gets rained away
or blown off before dawn. There isn't much of anywhere for it to climb up
or sink down *to*.
> As you go up in elevation, is it wetter or drier?
Up in elevation? Like, what, ten or fifteen feet? This is the *plains*.
What we call "hills," people from other parts of the country laugh to scorn;
there aren't any mountains at all. We have the river bluffs, but that's
mostly *down*, and not all that far down, either, by the standards of people
from places with actual mountains. If you're riding a bicycle, you can tell
that the Great Plains aren't flat, but compared to most of the rest of the
country, well, they are. Pretty much all the way from here to Denver. You
have to go a couple of states in any direction in order to get the sort of
change in elevation that I think you're talking about...and if you decide to
head north or south, the change in latitude will get you long before the
change in elevation will. The high plains in the western Dakotas are
drier -- just this side of desert -- but they're a couple of hundred miles
off, at least.
Um. You get lake-effect weather around the Great Lakes, especially on the
eastern shores (lots more rain and snow); smaller lakes have a much less
dramatic effect. You also get fall colors in late September or early
October -- this year, because we had a dry summer, they're predicting peak
fall color in the Twin Cities for the last week in September (some of the
maples are already beginning to turn). You get the most dramatic color
changes if you've had a good growing summer -- not too wet, not too dry --
followed by a fall with warm days and cool nights.
Oh, and if you want a good description of blizzards, Laura Ingalls Wilder's
THE TOUGH WINTER is pretty much the last word (they're still like that,
except we don't have the same problems with transporting food and things
anymore. But we still lose a couple of people every few years who get lost
in a storm and freeze to death -- couple of years ago, two people froze to
death in their own back yard in one of the northern suburbs, because they
couldn't see where the house was and just kept slogging in circles). Also,
one thing I remember from my visits to Boston is that the snow here stays
*snow* -- we don't tend to get the sort of freeze-and-thaw cycles that turn
snow to slush and then ice, except in the late fall and very early spring
when the ice doesn't last long anyway.
Snow....We get most of our snow in November-December and March; January
tends to be bitterly cold, which means the atmosphere is too cold to hold
enough moisture for snow. Everybody hopes for snow in January, because it
means the weather will be a little warmer for a day or two. February is
unpredictable; some years it's snowy, some years it's quite warm (i.e.,
above freezing for much of the month), some years it's dry and cold.
I hope some of that helps; if you want more specifics on something, lemme
know and I'll do what I can.
Patricia C. Wrede
.
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- Re: Critical Mass
- From: Helen Hall
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- From: Mary K. Kuhner
- Re: Critical Mass
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