Weather

[lizkat]

I don’t know if we’re due snow this decade or not.

If we get as much snow as we got rain this year, we'll have some we can ship south for a small fee.

Meanwhile deer season opens here tomorrow, so if the critters could read a calendar, they'd be hoping for today's snow flurries to finish melting off before sunrise and make it harder for hunters to find them.

Here in NYS this is the first season where 12- and 13-year-olds can hunt legally (under complete supervision by mentors). All the counties opted in, except where state law prohibits it in metro and densely populated suburban areas.

Well at least the new laws also mandate that all hunters wear blaze orange or pink. And yeah, some dairy farmers paint their cows or goats with splotches of those colors in this season. Make it a little harder for some brilliant hunter up from New Jersey to end up tagging a dairy goat as a doe...

For me it's the season of remembering not to wave my mail around coming back from the roadside box.

 

[Thomas Veil]

A half hour ago it was a raging snowstorm. Fifteen minutes ago it stopped. Now the sun's out.

 

[Yoused]

A half hour ago it was a raging snowstorm. Fifteen minutes ago it stopped. Now the sun's out.

We get exactly the same thing here, except with rain. Those raindrifts can get treacherous.

 

[Deleted member 215]

Well, we got a negligible amount of rain last night, but it was the first rainfall in over a month, and while it didn't make a dent in anything, it was nice seeing things wet this morning after weeks of dryness. Not looking good so far, but I'm hoping more rain is headed our way. Air quality here is still bad (from vehicle pollution and wood burning mostly) due to high pressure and lack of wind.

 

[Eric]

Well, we got a negligible amount of rain last night, but it was the first rainfall in over a month, and while it didn't make a dent in anything, it was nice seeing things wet this morning after weeks of dryness. Not looking good so far, but I'm hoping more rain is headed our way. Air quality here is still bad (from vehicle pollution and wood burning mostly) due to high pressure and lack of wind.

It'll be here Sunday in a big way, we have another atmospheric river covering the entire areas from the looks of it. If we can get two or three more of these throughout the winter it'll bring us back up to normal water levels.

 

[Deleted member 215]

I hope so. The pattern in dry years seems to be absolutely no rain in February (at least in the part of the Bay I live in), which really hurts the possibility of getting the normal amount. 2018, 2020, 2021 all saw not a drop in February (total rainfall was 80%, 70%, and 45% of normal respectively in those rain seasons). I'm hoping 2022 is different!

 

[Herdfan]

A half hour ago it was a raging snowstorm. Fifteen minutes ago it stopped. Now the sun's out.

Keep that up where you are. No need to send it south.

Depending on the model, we are supposed to get 0-2" tonight.

 

[Yoused]

Keep that up where you are.

That was like a week ago. The weather changes like … like … like some kind of figure of speech.

 

[lizkat]

We're in a pattern of colliding fronts from southwest and less strongly from the northeast that so far have resulted in a few minor snowfalls followed by rain or rising temperatures anyway, so nothing's really sticking in December to date. Nice for people still using woodstoves to be able to finish stacking firewood without racing to beat an incoming nor'easter. I was in that kind of hurry one year and it was not fun knowing that those first few snowflakes were the edge of no joke as a bro and I worked to finish up and rake out the mess on the lawn.

One weird thing though yesterday was that high winds from the southwest shifting to west were forecast and the weather service even included warnings that Christmas decorations might blow away in gusts up to 50mph. Topped out here around 37mph and I didn't notice any sleighs or stray reindeer with red noses in the yard today, Strange having wind from the southwest so often now in a still lingering late autumn. But hey it's not climate change.

 

[Herdfan]

and rake out the mess on the lawn.

Thanks for reminding me.

We have a few Bradford Pears that like to hold on to their leaves like a month later than everything else and then dropping them what seems like overnight. I usually get the first set of leaves up by bagging them with the mower the last time I mow, but these leaves are still on the ground waiting for me to blow them over into the woods.

And the little battery powered blower doesn't cut it as there are too many. So I have to break out the backpack blower to take care of them.

 

[Herdfan]

Well, it is smash-up derby out there on the roads as we got a snow squall that laid down about a half-to an inch. But since it barely broke freezing yesterday, a lot stuck to the roads. I'm not going anywhere for a while.

 

[Clix Pix]

First snowflakes of the season today! Just teeny-tiny little ones that aren't going to amount to anything, and nothing is sticking, thank goodness. I think the ground is probably still too warm for that as we've had on-and-off mild weather all autumn, no big freezes yet, etc. I knew we were to have something today and I was kind of hoping for the big, sloppy wet snowflakes, the really pretty ones that look so neat coming down and which are photogenic, but no such luck....

 

[DT]

OK, this is just ridiculous ...

 

[DT]

I mean, I actually WANT it to get cold[er], hahaha, I wore a flannel out the other morning, it was like 60°, by noon it was 73° and I was dying

 

[lizkat]

Thanks for reminding me.

We have a few Bradford Pears that like to hold on to their leaves like a month later than everything else and then dropping them what seems like overnight. I usually get the first set of leaves up by bagging them with the mower the last time I mow, but these leaves are still on the ground waiting for me to blow them over into the woods.

And the little battery powered blower doesn't cut it as there are too many. So I have to break out the backpack blower to take care of them.

I do like the look of the Bradford Pear, even though some cultivars are now tagged as invasive because they've managed to cross pollinate to the Callery, but they're rather brittle and don't do well around here sometimes in the wind, or in extreme winters without snow cover.

Heh, right, so I had planted a sour cherry in my side yard not long after I bought this place, figuring it for both ornament and pie fruit. Nice Montmorency. Lasted about six or eight years, had to fight off the birds for the cherries in summer, and wrap and wire it against the rabbits trying to get to the bark in winter, then the wind took it one year and I gave up and called the lawn guy to come chip out the stump so he'd have less stuff to mow around.

Never got another pie-cherry tree, kept thinking maybe just a hawthorn, settled instead for a rock garden and a long bed for annuals. My trees now are mostly conifers or maples, a few of the latter along the driveway, more of those and a few lumber cherries out back in a mini-forest section of the meadow.

 

[lizkat]

I mean, I actually WANT it to get cold[er], hahaha, I wore a flannel out the other morning, it was like 60°, by noon it was 73° and I was dying

It's turning out to be a warm December up here too, so you're losing at least some of that extra heat. Supposed to be 61º here on Saturday. The more usual daytime temperatures here now would be mid-30s. I don't mind. Keeps the plowing bill down since contractors here may send a bill for the season if they know you, but they charge per time they come out, not for the season. Too unpredictable now to quote a price for the whole winter, as one or the other party tends to lose their shirt.

 

[Herdfan]

I do like the look of the Bradford Pear, even though some cultivars are now tagged as invasive because they've managed to cross pollinate to the Callery, but they're rather brittle and don't do well around here sometimes in the wind, or in extreme winters without snow cover.

Don't be nice, they suck.

Landscapers around here use them because they grow fairly fast and look decent for a few years. But yes, they are brittle. One of our is missing almost half a side from last winter's ice storm. you need to keep them pruned from the inside or yes, the wind will take them right over. I would cut ours down except they are right in line for blocking the late day sun in the summer from hitting the house quite as hard. They will be the next owner's problem.

 

[Alli]

Supposed to be in the 70’s for the next week. But only between the hours of 11-3.

 

[lizkat]

Supposed to be in the 70’s for the next week. But only between the hours of 11-3.

Now that I could go for! I dunno how it's going to get to a rather mystifying forecast of 61ºF here by Saturday. It's 28 at the moment and they predicted "up to an inch" of snow tonight... meanwhile I've heard snowplows pass by twice each way in the last three hours... but the weather app says we've had only 2" snowfall in the last six hours, our broke-ass county sure doesn't send out a plow for an inch of snow, and absolutely none of that data is hanging together enough to believe in a fairytale about a heat wave on Saturday. Waiting for the wind to shift back to the south because right now it's straight outta Manitoba.

All I know is I'm not going to look out the window just to be able to yell at my iPhone's weather app "you lie!". Whatever's in my snailmail box tomorrow can hold its frozen breath for the promised heatwave. I don't even have my boots brought downstairs from summer storage yet. Climate change makes me lazier every year.

 

[jonblatho]

Goodness, it simply refuses to rain out here in central Oklahoma...

We had a similar weeks-long bout of essentially no rain but saw a bit of a reprieve in mid-fall (unfortunately with the bonus prize of giant hail here in Norman), and now we're right back where we were. :/