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Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby stargazer » Dec 11, 2016 10:05 pm

I'm dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones I used to know...

That is pretty much guaranteed now, with 10 inches (255mm) of fresh powder outside and temperatures expected to plunge this week (highs barely above 0F/-17C and night time lows around -10F/-24C).

However, I'm soon to leave for a holiday trip to visit family in Seattle, which usually is a lot warmer (but I hear they had some snow a few days ago, from this same storm).
But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby fantasia » Dec 12, 2016 7:32 am

While our temperatures might cooperate for a white Christmas, the precipitation is not. I do see Christmas Eve and Christmas Adam ( :P ) do have some chances in the forecast, but that's still a ways away and the chance isn't that great. We will see.

As always, the majority of our snow comes in January and February, so I don't expect this year to be any different.

Congrats to all of you who got snow that want it. ;) ;))
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby waggawerewolf27 » Dec 13, 2016 4:38 am

Nice to know you are all getting some nice cold Christmas weather. :) Summer has come roaring in with 39C temperatures, with minimums in the high 20's C. Bushfires of course, which isn't pleasant. I don't know why there are people so thick they would want to light fires in such weather conditions. All it causes is suffering and misery. (Now when I was young, things like that were caning offences - or worse :| )
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby johobbit » Dec 13, 2016 1:21 pm

I haven't posted here in far too long, but have certainly kept up with all the comments. ;;)

wagga, I simply melt at the idea of 39C temps. #:-s Stay cool. And :( re the bushfires. As you indicated, probably most of them are preventable.

We had a warmer-than-usual autumn, with a colder and more snowy December than in recent years. It feels and looks more like January. The snow started last Thursday—about 10" here in Oxford County, light and fluffy. So nice to shovel. On Sunday, however, the temps rose a bit to bring another 10" or so, but of the heavier kind. Whew. Thankfully our neighbour kindly plowed out our driveway. It was enough to shovel all around the cars and on the walkway. (My hubby's away on business, otherwise we would have gone at it together.) And I finally clued in, though, and put the car I drive in our garage to keep it cozy and warm-ish (compared to outside, anyway :P).

More snow is expected tomorrow and Thursday, but especially on Saturday. Temperatures are dropping to the frigid levels overnight for a few days.

Looks like a white Christmas for us too. :D Ideally, it would be nice to have a couple of feet of snow before Christmas Day, but then when all the traveling is taking place (for us, when our boys travel home), to have cold days and clear roads. I'm not asking too much, am I? ;))
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby stargazer » Dec 13, 2016 8:45 pm

December has been quite cloudy, but it was bright and clear this morning when I left the Twin Cities for Seattle (it was also a rather nippy -8F/-22C). Most of the route was clear and snow covered. As we approached Seattle there was a low overcast, and as we descended I saw something I've read about but never seen - the atmospheric phenomenon known as a glory - essentially a full tiny rainbow halo centered on the viewer's head. From an airplane it's a small halo on the clouds with the craft's shadow in the center. Very pretty! At first I didn't believe I was really seeing one. ;)) It lasted about 5 seconds before the plane banked and the view was lost.

Seattle had snow recently but very little remains. The afternoon temperature was 37F/2C, a little cool by local standards but almost toasty compared to when I left. It's overcast tonight so the stargazing will have to wait.
But all night, Aslan and the Moon gazed upon each other with joyful and unblinking eyes.
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby fantasia » Dec 14, 2016 8:55 am

We've had several chances of freezing rain/freezing drizzle stuffed into our forecast for the next week. My absolutely least favorite type of weather. Blegh. We need the moisture though so I hope we get something.

Wagga wrote: I don't know why there are people so thick they would want to light fires in such weather conditions. (Now when I was young, things like that were caning offences - or worse :| )

Do you have fines or jail time to deter such behavior? And is it arson? Or just people burning their trash at a bad time?
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby waggawerewolf27 » Dec 15, 2016 2:56 am

fantasia_kitty wrote:Do you have fines or jail time to deter such behavior? And is it arson? Or just people burning their trash at a bad time?


Yes we do have jail terms for arson, which is much more severe than mere fines. The penalties are particularly severe when police find out it is adults who are the culprits. The trouble is that there are also teenagers or even quite young children who do such things, being misled into thinking it is clever, and it is not always possible to get such people to understand how dangerous their behaviour is. These days children are to be treated with tender loving care, even when they commit what used to be a caning offence back when I was a girl. And boys will be boys, I suppose. 8-|

Though proper incinerators may be available, we don't burn our garbage (trash) here. We have nice wheelie bins where we are supposed to divide our rubbish into three lots. The yellow-topped wheelie bin is for recyclable materials such as glass, PET drink bottles, newspapers and tins etc, not to mention cardboard and recyclable supermarket packaging. We have a red-topped bin that is for anything that is truly "trash". These two bins are emptied in fortnightly collection services.

We wrap our food scraps into newspaper parcels or special corn-starch bags, issued by our local council which runs this service. Such organic material can be put into the green-topped bins, along with garden waste and lawn clippings etc and these bins are collected weekly. Plastic shopping bags can be bundled together and left at special bins at the supermarket and we can also recycle by taking spent batteries and printer ink cartridges to collection points at various interested businesses. We try to be environmentally friendly, in some districts more so than others.

johobbit wrote:wagga, I simply melt at the idea of 39C temps. Stay cool. And re the bushfires. As you indicated, probably most of them are preventable.


Yes you are right. We have boards up everywhere indicating to what degree it might be extremely dangerous, on a given day, to light fires. On really hot days it is illegal to light fires, and bushfire warnings are issued in news bulletins whether radio or TV. It isn't necessary to go lighting fires even when out on a picnic barbecue. There are plenty of picnic areas where gas or electricity barbecues are provided under shade, even when people don't have their own portable kibuchis or primus stoves. And our fire services are the only ones allowed to do backburning or to permit any backyard burnoffs.

Currently a cool change has reduced the dreadful heat to a much more manageable 25C. I hope nice cold White Christmas weather is proceeding nicely up there in North America. :) What I don't want is to have nightmares about a Black Christmas with fire sirens screaming, and smoke haze billowing. I'm having enough problems with my breathing as it is. :(
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby fantasia » Dec 16, 2016 1:23 pm

waggawerewolf27 wrote: These days children are to be treated with tender loving care, even when they commit what used to be a caning offence back when I was a girl. And boys will be boys, I suppose. 8-|

Ah, I understand. Yes, the coddling has made its way to the States as well. But that's a subject for a different thread.

Returning to the topic of weather, we've got a doozy of a winter storm moving in tomorrow. I'm sure stargazer and johobbit would laugh at our definition of "winter storm" but anyways... ;)) This sort of thing is rare in Kansas.
A chance of freezing drizzle before 8am, then snow likely. Areas of blowing snow after noon. Cloudy, with a temperature falling to around 8F by 5pm. Wind chill values as low as -13F. Blustery, with a north wind 21 to 25 mph, with gusts as high as 34 mph. Chance of precipitation is 70%. Little or no ice accumulation expected. New snow accumulation of 1 to 3 inches possible.
:|
It's been drizzling all morning and now we are in a dense fog advisory because it has warmed to a balmy 41F. :P
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby coracle » Dec 16, 2016 4:51 pm

Funnily enough, Waggawagga, we have the same colour scheme for our three bins here! Food scraps don't have to be wrapped though. I also have a compost bin which I try to put food scraps into, but tea bags have never composted for me, so they go in the green bin.
There is a regional ban on outdoor fires for most of the year - in fact, possibly all of it now for pollution issues. Only proper camping stoves or barbecues may be used.
The weather here is still very windy - which is more like the spring weather. Hay fever levels are very high!
El Nino is an odd beast!
Sometimes it will be still and warm in the morning, but then a wind springs up before lunchtime and it's important to peg washing well onto the line, and to check loose objects in the yard. My city, set on the east coast, gets a typical pattern of a rather brisk easterly/northeasterly from mid afternoon.
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby waggawerewolf27 » Dec 17, 2016 5:59 pm

coracle wrote:Funnily enough, Waggawagga, we have the same colour scheme for our three bins here! Food scraps don't have to be wrapped though.


I'd imagine so, since there is often much information exchanged across the Ditch (Tasman Sea), especially in New South Wales. Even so, a lot depends on which locality one lives in. Every three months our local Municipal Council, which also arranges periodical collections of electrical waste (eg used remotes, broken down PC's etc), paint and chemicals, issues us with packets of these special bags to collect our food waste etc. But they don't always last the distance, so as an alternative, newspaper can be used, and is especially useful dealing with wet food waste eg stale eggs etc. I'm inclined to think the racing and sporting pages are especially organic, though I agree that some people revere these sections. ;) Where our youngest daughter lives, the corn-starch bags are purple, but they are green around here.

coracle wrote:El Nino is an odd beast!
Sometimes it will be still and warm in the morning, but then a wind springs up before lunchtime and it's important to peg washing well onto the line, and to check loose objects in the yard. My city, set on the east coast, gets a typical pattern of a rather brisk easterly/northeasterly from mid afternoon.


Yes the Eastern seaboard of South Island would get a bit of weather from the Pacific, especially during an El Nino, due to the flow of the water. But don't you get some of the weather systems crossing over to you from Australia as well?

It must be a bad El Nino at the moment, since, according to the Aborigines, the Shark population increases exponentially when El Nino arrives. Their football team, "the Cronulla Sharks", even won the NRL football competition this year. :))

In this morning's paper they said there was quite a severe earthquake on the Papua Niugini coastline. I keep wondering if there might not be a link between El Nino and spates of earthquakes along the Eastern Pacific rim.
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby stargazer » Dec 17, 2016 9:09 pm

Did your winter storm arrive, fantasia? While we do get colder, ice is dangerous any time.

Here, north of Seattle, we got about 1 inch (25mm) of snow accumulation today, which is pretty unusual for this area. It was 'snowglobe' snow - the big, fluffy flakes that drift down without any wind. With temperatures around freezing, it was quite pretty if a bit risky to drive on.

Minnesota, on the other hand, is living up to its reputation tonight, with temps already well below 0F/-17C by early evening. Minneapolis should challenge its record low for Sunday morning, which is -25F/-31C, with wind chill values below -40; temperatures during the day will not reach 0F. This on top of 6-10 inches (150-250mm) of fresh snow. That's a bit brisk even for a polar bear like me!
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby fantasia » Dec 21, 2016 9:49 am

Yes indeed. And even on our incredibly cold day where the temps were well below freezing and the wind chill was even worse, my kids headed outdoors for a while to play in the snow. ;)) They did not want to come back in but they were forced to by their cruel parents. :P (I suspect that's why my daughter now has a nasty cold. :P )

A few days ago it looked like we MIGHT have a white Christmas. Well, that has now changed. Our current forecast for Christmas day is this: "Showers and thunderstorms, mainly before noon. High near 61F. Breezy. Chance of precipitation is 80%." Ok then. :P ;)) Busting out the t-shirts for Christmas.
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby stargazer » Dec 21, 2016 1:57 pm

Toasty, fantasia, toasty. :)

Happy solstice! The sun was farthest south at 1044 UT today (5:44 am US Eastern Time) and has already begun its 6-month journey north to the June solstice.

It's almost 50F/10C here north of Seattle and I'm just not used to such warm temps this time of year. ;))
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby waggawerewolf27 » Dec 21, 2016 3:44 pm

Fantasia_Kitty wrote:A few days ago it looked like we MIGHT have a white Christmas. Well, that has now changed. Our current forecast for Christmas day is this: "Showers and thunderstorms, mainly before noon. High near 61F. Breezy. Chance of precipitation is 80%." Ok then. Busting out the t-shirts for Christmas


Oh well, never mind. :( It won't be too bad to cook Christmas dinner in 61F. So far, in our summertime roller coaster weather, it has been unbearably muggy, sometimes with temperatures reaching 39C, then after some rain it cooled down with cloudiness today. But we are expected to go over 40C on Boxing Day. C'est la vie. Merry Christmas, anyway.
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby fantasia » Dec 21, 2016 4:19 pm

This is a question for a different thread probably, but I'll go ahead and ask here anyways. Do you have lots of cold dishes for Christmas in the southern hemisphere?
40C. That's awful!
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Re: Everyone wants to talk weather part 2

Postby waggawerewolf27 » Dec 22, 2016 2:03 pm

Fantasia_Kitty wrote:Do you have lots of cold dishes for Christmas in the southern hemisphere? 40C. That's awful!


Yes indeed! Though much depends on what people want and enjoy. Cold roast meats, like turkey and ham can be delicious served with salads, rather than vegetables. We get pasta, rice and coleslaw salads plus Greek and Caesar salads etc. Tabouli is sometimes popular. Cold cooked prawns are deliciously festive, accompanied by cold beers and other drinks. Once a Christmas pudding is cooked, it can be eaten cold, just like cake, sliced with a bit of brandy butter on it. One lovely accompaniment is a platter of sliced watermelon, honeydew and rockmelon, along with grapes and other fruits, and people might prefer pavlovas and trifle to the traditional Christmas pudding.

The heat can also influence how and where Christmas is spent. But it is still Christmas, and Happy Christmas to everyone in this discussion.
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