A tad chilly

Warm weather for laying around is the only way to go, but I don't love the cold weather.

I've made a few pilgrimages through the years to dark sky sites to view the Perseids. It's always worth it when the skies are clear, and beer just improves everything.

In November 1999 (iirc) we had the Leonid Meteor Storm, not Shower. I hung around the city and it was still by far the best meteor show I've ever seen. It was even decently warm that night--in the 50s as I recall.

I've never seen a big burst of meteors.  There are quite a few famous accounts of intense storms over the past few decades, but it's still a special event to actually be in the right spot (even though the "spot" mat be as big as a few states) and paying attention when one occurs.

I was just thinking, for most of those years we did our Perseid viewing just a couple hundred feet from the shore of the St. Mary's River (which is about 8 miles wide at that point), and we often had quite a bit of river fog, which really hugs the ground.  Usually the fog wasn't deep enough to prevent viewing upward, but a couple times it finally got thick enough to begin to dim out what would otherwise have been a good sky.  A couple summers we set up for our viewing on an anchored small sailboat a friend kept just offshore.  There were fewer mosquitos over the water.

A clarification-- I just checked and the St. Mary's is 7.6 miles wide where we viewed, but 2.2 miles of that width is taken up by Sugar Island.  Still, that leaves more than 5 miles of open-water river width to generate lots of fog! 

You fella's...can't even laugh at a joke.

A shooting star?  Really?

Maybe you should put in a  or a . It went over my head, too. *Whoosh*

Once I went back and read it again, it seemed obvious. First time, totally missed it.

I guess I still don't get it.  When he said "meteorites or shooting stars"  I thought he meant he couldn't tell whether they might have been large enough to possibly have reached the ground intact.

Well, man, to get my crappy jokes, ya' have to recognize that I'm not real bright.

What if I had written it correctly to begin with?

"I'm not sure they were meteors, though.  They were probably shooting stars."

I expect I would have figured out a way to screw it up anyway.  I'm quite a few years past the point where I no longer get smarter each year-- now it's just a matter of how fast I regress.  

Anyone been following the monster storm bearing down on Alaska?  Projections are for the pressure to plunge over the next few hours, intensifying the storm to record strength with hurricane winds over an area the size of Colorado.  They're calling for 40 foot waves, 6-8 feet of sustained storm surge, and severe erosion and flooding along the southern side of Norton Sound.  Nome, on the northern side of the sound, is expected to get pounded too, with 8-14 inches of snow delivered by sustained 60 mph winds.

Comparisons are being made with the 1974 storm, the worst in Nome's history. The tide cycle was worse in 1974, but there was much more pack ice available then to dampen wave and surge action.

You can see in the weather map from 3 hours ago that it's already down to 943 millibars in the core of the storm.

  This would be a good time to have a bunker laying around somewhere.

______________________________________________________________________

BTW, I'm expecting a snow report from you (CF) this month.

I heard something very much like this on "All Things Considered":  "Storms like this are common on Alaska's western coast.  Usually, though, there is an ice pack that breaks the waves before they can reach land, but because of global warming, there isn't much ice this year."

I laughed aloud.  I know that a lack of bias is impossible in a radio show, but it sure seems to be gettin' worse, don'cha think?  Incidentally, I am not denying that Polar Bear habitat isn't decreasing or anything nutty like that: I think the whole damn' story is stupid.  "Storms like this are common..." 

"There isn't much ice this year."  I'll bet there is.  I'll also bet that storm's tossing it around and shovin' it through people's front doors.

In other news:  Here in Wyoming, the temperature has been in the single digits in the morning.  It gets into the high thirties in the afternoon, with the sun shining.  Cystem', it's really weird to see the sun so much in November.  It's a daily occurrence and usually lasts for a while.  I didn't even know that the sun was visible from about November through the end of January in the northern hemisphere.

Here's a chart of surge levels a few hours ago.  Green is the normal tidal variation, less than 2 feet.  Red is the actual observed surge levels thus far for the storm.  Brown is the predicted surge levels, and Black is the predicted actual water level (combined surge plus tide).  So they're looking at 7 or 8 feet above mean normal.

The second photo is Kivalina, up the coast on the other side of the peninsula.  Not much relief.  And in Nome the first 2 to 4 blocks of city going inland from the beach is at less than 8 feet above MSL.

Assuming you meant me (CP) , your request was pretty well timed.  The first snow of the season is on the ground this morning as the sun is coming up (in 5 minutes), a good solid 2 inches or so that probably started coming down just after sunset last evening.  It should be wet and heavy, as my thermometer currently reads 31.3 F .

There haven't even been any air flurries that I've seen prior to this.  This snow won't last on the ground.  Projected high Ts are 39 today and back above 50 by Sunday and Monday.

  You assumed right!    

The Alaska storm has made it's way down here. It is coinciding with high tide, so there will be flooding in the Whidbey Island area.

I don't think I've ever seen wind like this before -- I just got back from the hardware store and as soon as I opened the hatch on my truck every piece of paper inside was gone.

I'm hearing that a number of the surrounding highways are shut down with overturned semis and that at least one house has lost it's roof:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2011/11/27/calgary-strong-winds-damage.html

http://calgary.ctv.ca/servlet/an/local/CTVNews/20111127/CGY_stron_wind_111126/20111127/?hub=CalgaryHome

It's a bit rainy over here.

Thanks for the report Grobe-- how long is the wind supposed to last?

The weather alert says "winds will gradually diminish this evening" -- good thing too, because there's no way I could sleep with the racket they're making.  They're advising that people stay inside and away from windows.

A bit of a shame, actually, because it's otherwise unseasonably nice out.

More:

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/calgary/story/2011/11/27/calgary-strong-winds-damage.html

Most reports cite 130 kph wind-speeds, but the affected skyscrapers were apparently hit with 149 kph winds at their top floors.

All calm and quiet now.