The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Long-range planning for the day

According to FlightAware, KLM 785 is over the central Atlantic and will land in just under 2½ hours. I've already showered and eaten, so it's likely I'll have time to make the 15-minute walk along the beach to the Sunset Bar & Grill to see it come in. The weather is -19°C and windy—sorry, that's back in Chicago. The weather here is 27°C with a gentle breeze from the east, same as the last 48 hours. (It did get all the way down to 24°C last night. Brr.)

After the 747 lands, I'm not exactly sure what I'll do, but it will probably involve lots of walking. And photos. Maybe a book; who knows? It's irie, mon.

Doing nothing is harder than it seems

I'm sitting in the only spot in my hotel that has free WiFi, with a dozen or so other people doing the same thing. Plus, it's possible this is the slowest WiFi in the world (I'm getting 150 kbps). These things make it easy to get out of the building, into island air that's currently 27°C.

I know, I said to people I wouldn't use the internet, but I actually needed a map and some local info that the giant book of wristwatch advertisements guidebook didn't actually tell me.

Plus, I forgot three somewhat useful things, so I'm waiting for the shops to open. Which I think they are now. So I can get the shorts, sunscreen, and hat I need to go for a hike, as the shorts, sunscreen, and hats I have back in Chicago (current temperature: -17°C) are kind of useless here.

Since I intend to be useless here, but I don't want to overheat or get sunburned, and all 300 emails that came in overnight have finished downloading, off I go.

Four hours, 39 minutes...I hope

I'm all set to go to a warm little island this afternoon, except for this:

Light snow continues to fall across the Chicago area with more moderate bands of snow close to and along the Lake Michigan shoreline. Moderate snowfall in the past hour has brought the Midway Airport total up to 148 mm.

Winter Storm Warnings and Advisories across the Chicago area continue in effect until noon today. Snowfall is slowly diminishing here as the center of low pressure has already tracked up the Ohio River valley into southwestern Pennsylvania.

Snowfall reports are rolling in early this morning – it looks like totals will range from 50-75 mm along the Illinois-Wisconsin border to 125-175 mm south of Interstate-80. Chicago’s official observation site at O’Hare had recorded 125 mm so far at 6AM with Midway closing in on 114 mm. Across central Illinois snowfall totals are running 150-225 mm.

When I took Parker out a few minutes ago, we practically sledded down the back stairs, then I just let him porpoise through the snow drifts in our back alley. Three minutes later, my cuffs and gloves were damp, and my hat had proved inadequate against the whistling, windy snow.

I do not want to spend the night in Miami. I really don't. All I want is for my flight out of Chicago to leave close to on-time. I'll deal with walking into my Caribbean hotel room in winter boots.

Global warming? Yes. Alaska

While the eastern United States continue to freeze in between snowfalls, Alaska is experiencing an astounding heat wave:

To give people an idea how freaky an event this was for the 49th State, NASA has put together a visualization of phenomenal temperatures from January 23 to the 30th. Based on satellite readings, the map shows warm-weather abnormalities spreading in red all across the region. Areas of white were about average, meanwhile, and blue spots show cooler-than-normal temps:

One of the most jarring things about this weather has been its effect on the snowpack. Widespread melting triggered a number of January avalanches, with one of the worst flinging a 100-foot-high pile of snow onto the Richardson Highway. The blockage stretched for hundreds of feet and completely sealed off land access to Valdez, a fishing port of about 4,000 people.

The cause? NASA says:

A persistent ridge of high pressure off the Pacific Coast fueled the warm spell, shunting warm air and rainstorms to Alaska instead of California, where they normally end up. The last half of January was one of the warmest winter periods in Alaska’s history, with temperatures as much as 40°F (22°C) above normal on some days in the central and western portions of the state, according to Weather Underground’s Christopher Bart. The all-time warmest January temperature ever observed in Alaska was tied on January 27 when the temperature peaked at 62°F (16.7°C) at Port Alsworth. Numerous other locations—including Nome, Denali Park Headquarters, Palmer, Homer, Alyseka, Seward, Talkeetna, and Kotzebue—all set January records.

That's the same phenomenon sending frigid Canadian air down into the eastern U.S. So when people wonder how to square their perceptions of winter with the reality of antrhopogenic climate change, tell them to go to Alaska. They might not understand but at least they'll be far away.

How far off from sun time are you?

Via the IANA Time Zone Database mailing list, through Randy Olson, comes this map showing the difference between local solar time and what wall clocks show throughout the world:

At the time I’m writing, near the winter solstice, Madrid’s sunset is around 17:55, more than an hour later than the sunset in, for example, Naples, which is at a similar latitude. The same difference holds at the summer solstice and around the year. Just because it applies to most places I’ve been, a time like that in Naples feels more natural to me, and probably to most non-Spanish people. But is it?

Looking for other regions of the world having the same peculiarity of Spain, I edited a world map from Wikipedia to show the difference between solar and standard time. It turns out, there are many places where the sun rises and sets late in the day, like in Spain, but not a lot where it is very early (highlighted in red and green in the map, respectively). Most of Russia is heavily red, but mostly in zones with very scarce population; the exception is St. Petersburg, with a discrepancy of two hours, but the effect on time is mitigated by the high latitude. The most extreme example of Spain-like time is western China: the difference reaches three hours against solar time. For example, today the sun rises there at 10:15 and sets at 19:45, and solar noon is at 15:01.

If you live in the green areas of the map, the sun tends to rise and set earlier than in the red zones. Not coincidentally, the places that set time policy tend to be neutral: London, Washington, Sydney, Beijing, Ottawa...they're all nearly dead-center in their respective zones. The notable exception is Moscow, where time policy goes back and forth and may even change once more this year.

Finally, a commenter on the Reddit MapPorn post where this also appeared points out: "Fun fact: The small Afghan-Chinese border is the largest jump in timezone in the world. (3 and a half hour difference on each side) You'd get jet lag crossing that border."

The last cold snap wasn't as bad as the one before

Three weeks back we had the coldest weather in 19 years. Forecasters predicted this week would be worse, but fortunately, they got it wrong:

We had a very fast chill-down Sunday night, then a good two and a half days of miserably cold weather, but yesterday afternoon the temperature peeked its nose above freezing for a couple of hours. And wow, does "above freezing" feel good right now.

For comparison, here's the week of January 6th:

So it really could be worse.

Jim Cantore will not lie down

Yesterday the world watched in horror as Atlanta shut down completely because of a little snow. Atlanta's politicians promptly blamed everyone else, even though they were elected to take responsibility for these kinds of things. Today, professional meteorologists fired back:

"The mayor and the governor got on TV yesterday and said all this wasn't expected, and that's not true," [meteorologist Al] Roker said Wednesday on [NBC's] TODAY [Show].

Roker and other meteorologists pointed out that the weather service issued its warning for metro Atlanta at 3:38 a.m. Tuesday — meaning "they were warned about it, and they should have been prepared for it," Roker said. "It's a shame. It really is."

"It absolutely breaks my heart," said Jim Cantore, a meteorologist for The Weather Channel.

"There are certainly chances that you take with this inexact science of forecasting a winter storm warning," Cantore said Wednesday. But this time, "the National Weather Service was absolutely spot-on with this."

In other words, Georgian politicians tried the Bilandic Defense and failed. (So did Bilandic, if you recall.)

Note to the South: this is one of those occasions when government could have helped, if you'd funded it.

Better weather in Georgia, but worse response

Pity the South. They really can't deal with winter weather:

In Atlanta, however, at 7 a.m. on Wednesday morning (well after the snowfall had stopped), [Mayor Kasim] Reed was talking about people still needing to get home.

Many of these people wound up passing the night at a grocery store or a stranger's home because the alternative was spending it on the highway, stuck in traffic that was barely moving, if at all. And people who didn't leave work soon enough – or schools that may not have sent children home early enough – quickly got stuck where they were. In Atlanta, schools didn't dismiss classes until after the snow started falling.

In the Northeast and Midwest, we regularly drive through this window: the first few hours of flurries. The great advantage of having snow plows (and salt trucks) is not just that they help clean up once a storm has passed, but also that they give us time to head home once it's already begun. If you don't have plenty of this equipment poised to hit streets before the first snowfall, chaos can set in immediately. That means that a region that isn't prepared ahead of time doesn't get much of a grace period to make up for that mistake.

Meanwhile, up here in Siberia, the next few weeks will be grim:

Chicagoans shiver[ed] through a 16th morning of sub-zero [Fahrenheit] temperatures Wednesday. But a measure of relief is on the way—albeit limited in scope and of shorter duration than many would prefer in the midst of a tough winter ranked 10th coldest and 5th snowiest to date.

While peak daytime temperatures are to surge 9°C Wednesday to a high of -7°C—and another 6°C to -3°C Thursday, snow chances are to increase in coming days as well.

A spell of snow is possible Thursday afternoon and evening with a more significant snowy period due Friday night into Saturday.

So what now? Only another 100-150 mm of snow. And then it will cool off again.

At this writing I'm 6 days and 19 hours from skipping town, though. I can cope for a few more days.

Thoughts about the necessity of getting groceries in the Arctic Vortex

My day became a non-stop parade of context shifts and meetings, so now that the temperature has dropped to -20°C (with a wind chill of -31°C), I'm wondering just how important having cream in my coffee will be tomorrow morning.

Two other thoughts:

First, I lived through the winters of 1983-84 and 1984-85, the first notable for giving us 100 hours of sub--18°C temperatures ending Christmas morning, the second for giving us the all-time-lowest temperature in Chicago (-33°C). I didn't go to school on that day (20 January 1985), only because that day was a Sunday. We went to school the next day, though. We all survived.

Second, despite having had that experience as a child, I don't want to have it again. No. Forget it. We're having the coldest winter in a generation, and I'm tired of it.

You know, before this winter, I don't think I ever complained about winter weather on this blog. Sure, I posted about getting my car buried, and walking along a surreal Lake Shore Drive, but until the past few days I don't think I ever went negative.

Fuck that. This sucks. Five days in the Caribbean isn't long enough.