The Daily Parker

The Chicago Forestry Department removed a tree near my house back in October but left the stump. No one could figure out why—until they tried to remove it a few days ago:

I'm not an arbologist, but it seems to me that the tree had bionic parts. Actually, it looks like it grew through a steel grating in the parkway and then absorbed the grating. In any event, I hope no one got hurt when they tried sawing through the stump.

Tomorrow will be quieter than today, I hope, or I might not get time to think until next week. I didn't miss these meanwhile:

• The corporations have won massively: network neutrality might be really and truly dead.
• Chicago has banned indoor "vaping", for some reason.
• Spend 100 seconds with the demon baby of New York.
• When a convention wants to come to your hotel, don't insult them.
• 9,135 out of 9,136 scientists agreee: global warming is happening.

Next meeting...

A century ago, engineers cut the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, connecting the Great Lakes with the Mississippi Basin. It might be time to close the canal:

Over the last decade or so, a huge range of interests — from environmental groups to fishermen to shipping experts to politicians — have raised the alarm over just how much this artificial connection has created an opening for invasive species such as the Asian carp to make their way through North America’s waterways. And the costs associated with the damage caused by these species have been high enough to prompt serious consideration of closing off the link between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes.

How high? First, consider the figure $18 billion. That’s the estimate the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers released last week to re-insert a physical separation between the Great Lakes and the Mississippi system.

The proposal would dam the Chicago and Calumet Rivers' connections to the Canal, requiring changes to the Deep Tunnel reservoir system and the flood-control systems in the Western suburbs. Meanwhile, Asian carp have gotten within a few kilometers of Lake Michigan. Twenty of those fish in the lake is all it would take to create a permanent population all the way to the Gulf of St. Lawrence.

Reversing the Chicago River made a lot of sense in 1900, and probably saved thousands of lives from cholera and other diseases. Times change, though. We have new threats today.

Just 120 hours ago, a polar vortex wandered into the center of North America and froze us solid. Less than an hour ago, at 8:39am CST, the official temperature at O'Hare hit 0°C—27°C warmer than 9am Monday morning. It's also the first time the temperature has gotten up to freezing since December 29th.

I've lived in Chicago for a long time, so I can say this graph is extraordinary (data from my demo at Weather Now:

Of course, with 250 mm of heavy, wet snow on the ground, rain in the forecast, and temperatures rising to 4°C today, we have new problems:

Patchy drizzle is to fall from the saturated atmosphere into a sub-freezing air mass Friday morning and early afternoon. This could produce slippery spots. But, the main event—a round of rain, likely to be heavy at times—arrives later Friday and continues into Friday night.

With the ground snow-covered and the soil below it frozen, the prospect of rain falling on a 250 mm snowpack at the same time temps surge above freezing is ominous. Moisture has nowhere to go in such a situation but to sit in pools or exit the area as run-off, a development which could produce some flooding.

But we're still glad to be shot of those incredibly cold temperatures. We've had 12 days below -18°C this year, a feat achieved in only three other winters since we started keeping score in 1871. Which brings up an interesting graph from Minnesota:

So even this year's bitter cold temperatures in the Midwest fit into a trend showing gradual moderating of Minneapolis weather. I would wager we could produce a similar chart for Chicago. Our -27°C reading Tuesday morning, after all, was still warmer than the record -33°C temperature I experienced (briefly) on 20 January 1985.

Wow did it seem warm this morning. I hope this week was the last of our super-frigid temperatures. Now we've just got to get through a few more months of snow.

Here's the semi-annual Chicago sunrise chart . (You can get one for your own location at http://www.wx-now.com/Sunrise/SunriseChart.aspx .)

Sunrises are just starting to get earlier, but today's (7:18 CST) is only a few seconds earlier than the latest sunrise of the year on January 3rd. Even though the sunrise times creep earlier by seconds every day, sunsets start to get noticeably later: 16:39 today, 7 minutes later in a week, 25 minutes later in three weeks. January is cold and dark, but (on average) a few degrees warmer and 48 minutes longer when it ends than when it begins.

You can get sunrise information for your location at wx-now.com.

Illinois State Climatologist Jim Angel has his annual review of the state's weather for last year. Some highlights:

Based on the latest data, the statewide average temperature for 2013 in Illinois was 10.6°C (0.8°C below the 1981-2010 average). That is much cooler than 2012 when the statewide average temperature was 13.1°C.

The statewide average precipitation for 2013 in Illinois was 1112 mm (91 mm above the 1981-2010 average). The precipitation for the two halves of 2013 were very different. The precipitation for the first 6 months of 2013 totaled 736 mm and was 232 mm above average and the wettest January-June on record. The precipitation in the following 6 months of 2013 totaled 376 mm and was 141 mm below average and the 19th driest July-December on record.

By the way, the 2013 annual statewide average precipitation of 1112 mm was 329 mm wetter than 2012 when we received only 783 mm across the state.

Of course, there's art:

The temperature at O'Hare just reached -18°C for the first time since 11pm Sunday, 39 hours ago:

This was pretty much as forecast. The updated forecast predicts continued warming through the weekend (click for full size):

Perhaps by tomorrow, walking to the bus stop won't cause my eyelashes to freeze.

The temperature outside has gone up a whopping 0.9°C (to the tropical -23.6°C) since this morning. At O'Hare, it looks like the temperature bottomed out around 8am:

Let's hope it continues to rise. I'm really curious what this graph will look like in three days.

Just now, at Inner Drive Technology World Headquarters:

(Compare with four years ago, when I bought the thermometer while sojourning in North Carolina.)

The official temperature at O'Hare is -27°C, breaking the previous record of -25°C set in 1988. We might even break the record low maximum temperature—the coldest high temperature ever on this date—of -18°C set in 1912.

I have not gone outside today, and until I take Parker out after he gets back from day care, I have not plans to do so.

At least the cold snap will be brief; they're forecasting above-freezing temperatures by Friday.

I've gone to my remote office to do some work. Unfortunately, they wouldn't let me sit in the beer garden:

Fortunately, I found an acceptable seat inside:

My real office is closed tomorrow because no one wants to commute on the coldest day since 1995. I hope something is open. Or at least, I hope someone delivers.