Six to ten inches of it forecast to fall on my head tomorrow, says the latest forecast for my zip code from Weather.com. I haven’t even had to turn on the heat yet this fall, and now this. Isn’t this, like, in the book of Revelation, or something? Dag.
Hey, honey, I have a great idea — let’s move our butts to Louisiana
UPDATE: Oh good, now the forecast is for only one inch in Philly. Still, though!
I lived my whole life in the suburbs of Philadelphia until I moved to Toronto almost two years ago. This July I moved from Toronto to Dawson Creek, a small town in northern British Columbia, north of the southernmost point of Alaska (which isn’t quite as impressive as it sounds – Alaska sneaks down pretty far along the coast of BC, much to the annoyance of many Canadians). Sometimes there’s a foot of snow here by the beginning of October. And yet – it looks like Philly’s going to get snow before I do, robbing me of my chance to elicit pity from my friends back home for the long winter I’m about to endure. It ain’t right.
Cooler weather has come to south central Louisiana – barely made it out of the 50s today. Great autumn weather for football and school fairs…
Glory to God for all things!
cecelia says: I just turned my heat on for the first time today – and now I discover we are suppsoed to get 4-6 inches with temps going to 28′ at night. I literally still have squash growing in the garden – guess I better get it harvested!
I suspect Rod this is all your fault – Mother Nature needed to give you and the kids a good Northeast sendoff before you return to the land of never get any snow.
Weird! In my neck of the woods, the winters are usually long and harsh, and it seems the past three or four winters have all been harsher than usual.
But this year you’ve beaten me to it. Our forecast for tonight involves a slight chance of a little sleet, but nothing like no 6 to 10 inches of the white stuff. Weather masochist that I am, I almost envy you!
Actually, my understanding is that snow in October is the way things used to be, before the warming trend of the last few decades.
I have about one more week left of fieldwork to get done this season, so for self-interested reasons I’m hoping the snow in this part of the Midwest holds off for another week.
JonF says: We may see some snowflakes, but it looks like Baltimore is far enough south we won’t get snow-on-the-ground.
And just last year I remember it being warm enough in late October that I went to an outdoor Oktoberfest with no jacket or sweater. Why can’t global wraming be consistent?
Frederick says: I moved from the north (take a wild guess which state) to Texas 3 years ago. I live in a part of TX where it snows on average once every ten years. I don’t think I can ever live in snow again. Nothing beats going out in January in just a sweater or light jacket.
SteveM says: Rod, it’s a weather-god beat-down reminding us that the Phillies aren’t in the Series…
Roland de Chanson says: If I were God I wouldn’t have tilted the Earth. So much for intelligent design.
Elli says: We’re still not getting our first frost until the end of October, which is how it’s been for the last twenty years or so. (Fields half a mile away frost two or three weeks earlier – for some reason our little NJ town is frost-sheltered and our flowers bloom into November.
I’ve seen snow in May and snow in October – it’s not going to stick around for long.
JonF says: Roland,
The Earth’s tilt is what keeps it stable. Something to do with the gravitational effects of the Moon. If we didn’t have the Moon and the Earth’s c. 23 degrees tilt our planet would wobble badly over the eons, sometimes even flipping on its side as Uranus currently has. Needless to say such a world would not be very friendly to us. God usually knows what he’s doing.
MH - Scientismist says: JonF, I heard that hypothesis as well, but I suspect it is wrong. All the planets except Uranus are at roughly the Earth’s axial tilt or less. If axial tilts varied over time, then we should see more variation than this. The only evidence for it are some computer models as well.
Only the Earth has an oversized moon, so that doesn’t seem to be a factor. I suspect Uranus is the odd duck and something catastrophic happened to it.
JonF says: MH – Scientimist
Venus rotates backward, meaning its axis is tipped 180 degrees opposite ours.
Mercury is tidally locked in by the sun (as the Moon is by the Earth)
Mars is only temporarily at similar tilt. There’s evidence it’s tilted back and forth over the ages.
And those computer models are based on mathematics which have been tried and proven for several centuries now. At this point disputing orbital mechanics, except where quantum or relativistic effects might be at play, is pretty much out of bounds.
MH - Scientismist says: Mercury is not tidally locked as its day is 58 days, 15 hours on Earth and the year is 88 days. You might mean tidal drag.
I have heard several reasons for Venus retrograde rotation, most of them hard to falsify. One hypothesis is that it is a combination of atmospheric drag and tidal the effects. Basically the day kept slowing down until it was longer than the year.
I don’t take issue with the math behind the computer models. I take issue with the stability of the floating point calculations. Truncation and rounding errors accumulate with each iteration until the results become dominated by the accumulated errors.
Numerical computing and modeling is much trickier than people realize. Without the ability to feedback real data into the model you can’t correct for errors.
Hey Rod! This seems like the best place for me to express how glad I am to see you blogging again. How come I didnt know about this sooner??
It used to be that you would frustrate me on a regular basis but once you were gone, I really missed all the “deep” discussions all of us used to have at your old blogging spot. Its hard to find a place for that on the interwebs.
Looking forward to more of those in the future. Welcome back!