Re: Critical Mass

(I know this is an old thread, but I figured another datapoint might be useful, and I grew up in the mountains of western Virginia, which is rather different from Patricia Wrede's plains!)

Mary K. Kuhner wrote, on needing firsthand experience of inland weather:
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.) 

How bizarre!  :)

The great walls of storm are pretty much typical of the weather fronts in my part of Virginia, too, although it's a bit harder to see them given that there are mountains around. (Some would do them dishonor by calling them hills; they tend to be in the range of a thousand feet or two from bottom to top, but they are very definitely mountains.)

The general effect of summer thunderstorms is that it starts looking dark off in the distance (our "down the mountain" view was to the west, where the weather generally came from), and then an hour or so later it starts getting noticably darker up close, and then there are a few spatters of rain, and then it starts coming down in buckets, and after anywhere from ten minutes to an hour or so it starts letting off and the cloud cover starts lightening a bit.

Actually, now that I think about it, we didn't have great walls of storm, really, so much as great clumps of it, probably a fifty or a hundred miles across. Sometimes they'd pass north or south of us, but they were big enough that the mountains hid all but one "face" of them.

I have fond memories of flying into the local airport (in a small 737, I think this one was) on a stormy day, and spending most of an hour circling the thunderstorm that was over the city -- we were above the rain clouds that surrounded it, and it was getting close to sunset, and there was this majesty of miles-high vertical walls of cloud with passageways that we were flying through, in white shading to deep gray, and beginning to be illuminated with the yellow and orange and pink of the oncoming sunset. And then it cleared enough that we could land, and we flew into it, and in about a half-minute we were through the clouds and had gone from still-bright sunset and bits of blue sky to a dark evening with deep gray clouds overhead and gusts of wind and lightning and pounding rain, and a couple of minutes more and we had landed.

Rains other than thunderstorms tended to be rather more spread out; whole days of off-and-on drizzle, or whole days of occasional drizzle and occasional not-quite-drizzling. Or half-days, followed by rain into the night. Or such.

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.

Same in Virginia, pretty much. Sometimes there are strong gusts of wind, but not usually with coherent reverses of direction -- and they aren't part of all storms. Of course, the mountains do weird things to the winds anyway, though.

How much micro-climate do you have?  Do you ever get up in the morning
to find half the city has snow and the other half doesn't?  Does it
rain only on one side of the street?  I've heard we are unusual in that
regard.

It happens quite a bit with snow, though the microclimates are mostly in horizontal layers -- up at our house we'd have three inches of snow on the ground, but when we'd dropped a couple of hundred feet in elevation the roads would be clear and there'd be just a light dusting on the fields, and another hundred feet and it would be slushy and muddy, and another hundred feet it would just be soggy and muddy, and then up at the mountain pass on the way to town it would be snowy again.

There is, I should note, a distinct quality of cold muddy yellow sogginess to fields and roadsides in late winter under a sky blanketed with pale gray snow clouds that are producing drizzle, and the ground is mud-yellow and the grass has all gone a dead yellow that's been bent and waterlogged under the last snow, which is all gone save for tiny bits of melting gravel-crusted slush at the side of the road, and the trees are all bare and dripping gently, and the cows huddle damply next to the soggy yellow hay bales for warmth.

Also, things tend to be a bit different on one side of the mountain from the other, though that seems to be more about quantity of rain whether than about whether there was any at all.

This kind of thing is hard to get from guidebooks.  Does the fog come
in the morning or the evening?  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.)  Does the fog melt away, climb up,
sink down?  As you go up in elevation, is it wetter or drier?

Fog mostly came in in early morning; it melted away shortly after sunup. Mostly it came off damp ground (from yesterday evening's rain) or off the creeks and rivers; those places are always foggier. And the deep bits of valley with a large creek in the bottom would often stay foggy until mid-morning, because the sun took so long to get there.

Alternately, there were sometimes low-flying overcast clouds which caused it to be intensely foggy at our house near the top of the mountain, but then a few hundred feet lower it would be completely clear (and probably faintly misting drizzle) at ground level. Those mostly went the way of all overcast clouds and cleared away eventually without particularly going anywhere.

The elevation changes didn't really seem to affect the wetness much; the rains that really got things wet were thorough long rains, not heavy, but persistent and thorough, and the whole area got wet through.

- Brooks


--
The "bmoses-nospam" address is valid; no unmunging needed.
.

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