And then the rains came! And the tornadoes!

Check out my You Tube Video for the feel of the storm that came through and trashed many businesses along the Hwy 76 strip in Branson Missouri!

One morsel of information I've gleaned from reading source material concerning the last Little Ice Age was just how extreme the weather can become during a period of rapid climate change. In a short amount of time, conditions can go from warm to cold, from wet to dry and then back again without seeming rhyme or reason. What was once thought to occur over decades can occur in just a few short years. Only in a rear view mirror that stretches back centuries can one discern that indeed there was indeed a pattern to it all.

Are we at the very beginning of another great change in the natural order of things? I don't know. I do know that in just the last few years it has seemed to me that something is not quite as it should be. Winters have been milder with the spring coming much sooner than I remember it. Storms that sweep through the Midwest seem to have acquired a harder edge, with tornadoes occurring much more frequently and further to the north. Drought conditions like those seen in Texas have become more common only to be followed by flooding rains the next season. Wild and wacky is how I would describe the state of the weather.

This March has followed the pattern with killer tornadoes spawned in multiple states in the first week only to be followed by record breaking temperatures in the second. Now, as we approach the official start of spring, the rains are coming. A deluge of as much as eight inches is forecast to fall on parts of my state as a slow moving cold front interacts with very moist air fed from the Gulf. Mixed into all this wetness will be the isolated tornado that should keep everyone on their toes. Hold onto your garter belt Mildred, it only gets more interesting from here!

Ah spring! A time of renewal!

According to the weather people, spring begins on March the 1^st , not the 21^st! And, I think that Mother Nature pretty much has agreed with that as she started off the season with much climate turmoil that is so characteristic of her entrance after Old Man Winter has had his say.

This year of 2012 has certainly been unusual with record warmth during January and February and now devastating storms that wrecked havoc over much of the middle and eastern parts of the country on February the 29^th and March the 1^st! It will be most interesting to see what is in store for the north American continent as the year progresses!

Introduction

This blog is intended to be a series of posts that chronicle some weather events in and around the Forsyth Missouri area for the fall and winter period of 2011-12. Please feel free to check it out from time to time! (Ctrl D to bookmark).

“Who da man? Who DA MAN? Old man winter, he be da man!"

And, just maybe, he’s already on his way down to the North American Continent for an extended stay in 2011-12. That seems to be the consensus of some weather experts. While no one can predict exactly what Mother Nature has in store for us, the climatic trend seems to point to interesting times ahead… that is, if you like weather extremes. The following post details my expectations for the coming winter!

Below is information concerning average temperatures and rainfall for the Forsyth Mo. area by month:

(Please click on graphic below to expand)

February Weather Summary for 2012

What set this past February apart from those that came before was the boredom factor. This one was so boring...How boring was it? It was so boring, even the Weather Channel lost interest! Only in hindsight, with that month now firmly in my rear view mirror, can I even bear to talk about it.

Whenever the temperature outside hovers around the fifty degree mark, I have a tendency to develop a nervous tic in one eye. You see, the half century mark is just warm enough to encourage me to venture outdoors, while still being cold enough to make me regret the decision once I do. It foments internal anxiety and thus causes my eye to twitch to and fro. (A condition that makes it all but impossible to hold a conversation with another person as they begin to focus more on that twitching than to anything I might have to say). So, when I say that February was a real 'eye-twitcher', I'm not just fooling around!

The average high for the month was 52F with a low that was around 32F This made the mean temperature 41F versus the 30 year average of 38F. (More evidence of global warming or just another anomaly)? You make the call. Of greater concern, the rainfall was really lacking at only 1.5 inches versus an average of 3. I found this worrying because of the predictions that much of the Midwest may be entering a prolonged period of drought! (Perhaps March will bail us out in that respect).

One pleasant observation, as March arrived, was the daffodils in my yard that are getting ready to bloom! This large clump in my yard come up every year on about the first week in March and thus heralds in the first color of spring! Before too long the Bartlett pear trees will be in bloom as will the Forsythia. A welcome burst of activity and color after enduring the blah months that came before.

The Little Ice Age: How Climate Made History 1300-1850

I came across this book titled 'The Little Ice Age' by Brian Fagan more by accident than anything else one afternoon while doing some research for information concerning the effect of disease back in Medieval times. The title intrigued me and so I downloaded it from Amazon to check out and was glad I did.

Mr. Fagan, it seems, is the author or editor of over 46 books, including seven widely used as undergraduate college texts. Prof. Fagan has been an archaeological consultant for many organizations, including National Geographic Society, Time/Life, Encyclopedia Britannica, and Microsoft Encarta so he is definitely credentialed and an informed source. More importantly, he is also an engaging author that is both easy to read while not talking above the lay person at the same time.

This particular effort is divided into four parts. Part One describes the Medieval Warm Period, roughly from 900 to 1200. Parts Two and Three describe how people reacted to the cooling weather, and how devastating climatic changes are for societies whose agriculture is at subsistence level. Part Four covers the end of the Little Ice Age and the sustained warming of modern times. All four parts make for fascinating, sometimes even disturbing reading; and for the reader new to the field Fagan offers the basic explanations of the effects of oceanic currents and air pressure on the climate in Europe. Strangely, however, the story he tells is unerringly reminiscent of the time we live in today. You really cannot read this from cover to cover without looking anew at the world we live in today and how the lessons of the past may become the realities of our future.

Many of my friends have scoffed when it comes to the topic of rapidly changing weather patterns. In point of fact, current U.S. energy and environmental policies seem to be guided by the kind of optimism that "fades in the face of demographic reality.... [I]t's implausible to suggest that famines and massive dislocations of poorer populations will be unaccompanied by civil unrest and disobedience...," the professor warns in his work. "The French Revolution or the Irish potato famine pale into insignificance." The most important lessons for the era of Global Warming may be found in the chill of the middle of the last millennium, if only we know how to read them.

Weather in the first half of February 2012 why I find it troubling!

In many respects, the winter of 2012 has been very unusual and maybe even a bit disturbing to me. With all the talk about climate change, it gets easy to read all kinds of nasty stuff into what may be normal variability.

The first half of February is a good case in point, especially when you also look at what happened a year ago. The graph below comprises data that I recorded at my location here in Forsyth, Missouri using a Davis Weather Monitor II. The blue line represents the average combined temperature of 38F recorded over the last 30 years. As you can see, there was a very big swing or departure from normal in the temperatures recorded in 2011 and a somewhat more moderate range recorded by me so far this year. 

Click to enlarge

Seeing extremes in the average for a day or even a group of days is not all that unusual. Seeing such large fluctuations (deviation from the norm) almost daily certainly raises some questions. And then, when you compare data from 2002 (graph below) for the same location and look at the ‘trends’ you can easily see that while back in 2002 the temperature was on average still cooling down, in 2012 it’s already on a fixed and definite warming trend! (The overall shift seems to be about 2 degrees Fahrenheit upwards).

Click to enlarge

What does this mean? Perhaps nothing, yet when you combine other data along with the realizations of what common sense dictates; something seems to be happening and seems to be happening relatively fast!

Winter Invasion – Feb 13 – Day 4!

AKA – ‘The Mother of all Storms’! Hopefully, this will be the final installment of the mini blog series that absolutely no one is truthfully destined to read! Today is Monday, February the 13th and the much advertized winter storm is… here? Or is it? After all the hype, I’m not sure what to call this endpoint of a story! Let me start back earlier in the pre-dawn hours when my inability to sleep allowed me to catch the first change of guard.

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[12:00 Midnight] - Unable to sleep in all the excitement, I got up briefly at midnight to check my Davis weather station. Same-o same-o for the last few hours in terms of readings; temperature at 35F, winds 1-2 mph from the southeast and a very dry atmosphere with a relative humidity of 30%! Surprisingly, the weather service in Springfield has decided to perform maintenance on their radar at this juncture. Sure! Why not! Nothing important going on here boys!

The latest weather guidance (guesswork) from the NWS, as far as the forecast went, was to say that the appearance of any snow down here in the Branson Missouri area may not show until sometime after 6AM! Seems that old atmosphere is really very dry and like an old alcoholic, it will take some time to get it properly saturated. So, even at this early hour of the 13th, perhaps the seeds of forecasting failure have been sown! Boy! What a surprise to see this group strike out yet again.... well, back to sleep.

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[3:15 AM] - The outside temperature has begun to move downwards once again with a reading of 33.9F at 3:25 AM. Winds that had been out of the southeast were also not out of the south now, but south southwest and picking up a little at 4-5 mph. The humidity was also on the rise now at 53%. As the radar indicated moisture overhead, I think things were beginning to happen. By 3:30 AM the temperature was now at 33.6F with the RH at 56%. Rapidly now, it was apparent the outside was getting colder! By 3:36 AM it now read 32.8F. Hmmm, lying there in bed, I began to suspect something was up! I got up – looked outside - and sure enough a light snow was now falling. (You weather people are all summarily forgiven)!

As I watched the flakes fall into the dark night, I theorized that the snow was also melting as it neared the surface and entered warmer air. This process (heat of fusion) then causes a rapid cooling of the air just above the surface of the ground which results in any additional snow now making it all the way down. That would account for the rapid transition from relatively warm air to below freezing air in such short order (35F to 32F in twenty minutes). Note: The actual freezing point (32F) was achieved, by the way, at 3:47 AM at least according to my instruments.

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[7:00 AM] - Time to rise and shine! OK, maybe I'll settle for just getting up. Man o man, its day four! I thought to myself. And, after witnessing the snow begin to fall during the overnight period; I knew that I was really in for it now! Need I remind you, it has been an ARCTIC INVASION, and today I would be chronicling the MOTHER OF ALL STORMS. Heady stuff that.

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After falling out of bed, I wandered over to the window and shot a picture which was made into this ‘before and after’ photo. Pretty hairy scene, no? Just look at how all that snow has almost covered the road surfaces! What ya think? We got maybe an inch out there? Some one go find my sled! Glad I won't have to get out in it... or will I? Being the adventurous sort of man I am, perhaps I felt I owed it to my (one) readership to crank up the old Jeep and go brave those elements! Sighing and with that thought in mind, I reached around to scratch my behind while heading for the kitchen. Ah, another day, another bowl of cereal, I thought while mentally gearing up for the challenges ahead.

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As it turned out, just writing this post turned out to be the hardest challenge. As the morning wore on, the mercury stayed pretty much stuck at 29F while outside a very ‘pretty snowfall’ took place. It was the kind of day you would wish occurred on say December the 24^th! You know, sleigh bells and snow to help get everyone in the mood to open gifts and drink too much eggnog. But, seeing as it was the middle of February (which has absolutely nothing going for it) I found those swirling flakes a bit flakey. And, for those of my friends who actually work for a living, this crap may have held off just long enough to possibly get them stuck at work. ‘Uh, Frank, since you’re stuck here for a bit, would you mind getting that TPS report done and on my desk?’ See? Depressing and flakey, all at the same time!

Epilog

I always wanted to do a story that had an epilog. So, I guess this is my chance. First off, I never actually set foot outside. The snow keep falling to the point where there was close to two inches on the ground. I felt this extreme amount to be UNSAFE for me to travel in (even though I have a four wheel drive vehicle).

As the day wore on into night, the snow finally let up and I went to bed. The end!