What's With The Cold?

After a succession of mild winters, northern United States dwellers are biting their lips on the cold reality that has lately set in just out the door.  Things are cold, growing zones have been laughed all the way back to Washington, and everyone and their brother is suddenly looking to castrate Al Gore.  Then we have the mainstream media, with their horror stories of how awful this slightly difficult winter has been, and how freezing temperatures have made it all the way down to (gasp) northern Florida.  I have news for these people, I really do: It's been pretty cold in snaps as recently as 2012, that very same year where we thought we were going to all die from being consumed in a huge fireball of drought and intense heat:

That's a polite map too (I never took a shot of the map that we had back in 2011 where Miami clocked in at a lovely 32 for an overnight low), but it does tend to illustrate a point nicely.  In the west we see all sorts of blotches on the colorful landscape, indicative that there are some mountains there throwing things off a bit.  Not so back east, where we have a lovely arc heading southward, nearly uninterrupted.  The Great Lakes, at least in their southern reaches, seem to moderate things a little bit, and there is a discernible line of defense in Virginia and North Carolina where the cold seems to taper off in a sudden halted advance (those Appalachians are doing their work, yessir), but by and large the only thing stopping the onslaught is a very warm and moist Gulf of Mexico giving a punch back northward.  Without it, that 30 we see over in Laredo, Texas (right east of where the US-Mexico border curves southward again) would be a more familiar sight in New Orleans or Daytona Beach.

The last great glacial period of our climate was pretty much a situation where the Gulf of Mexico had the tar beaten out of it by a mile high mountain of ice that spent thousands upon thousands of years pushing south of it's chief rival, Hudson Bay.  Really, if we want to know what is with the cold, we can blame Hudson Bay, because it is inviting it's friend the Polar Air Mass/Vortex/Flavor of the month name south, and they then decided to crash a party over at Jet Stream's house, and... well, those are some pretty cold days we have been having lately, right?  Back in the late seventies, this sort of thing happened for a few winters, and combined with the cooling trend we saw from the forties until then, all sorts of scientists (many of whom now argue in favor of global warming) were thinking that our interglacial period was up.  What they did not know was that while things are quick to warm up (a melting glacier is like a runaway freight train that melts under itself and heats up by virtue of getting lower in elevation, melt-water heating the surrounding ice, etc.), the freezing process, at least in terms of climate, takes a lot longer.  That huge continental glacier still had to fight off summer melt, lower-elevations, etc.  Hudson Bay is the endurance fighter to the Gulf of Mexico's quick show, for sure.

Anyway, that could open up a whole other can of worms regarding Climate Change (gasp), which I am more than eager to jump into, but for this post at least, I will keep things simple:

1. We have seen this sort of cold before and this is not the apocalypse.

2. You can get a hard freeze as far south as Tampico in Mexico or Miami in Florida, simply because we don't have east-west mountain ranges to block off the Arctic air masses which Hudson Bay can send far more south than anything resembling similar latitudes over in frosty Siberia (which, as a rule, gets even colder, but tends to keep the freezer up farther north; they have forests which can see -70F in a normal winter while seeing 70F during the summer, while we have a much more southern treeline than they do, because Hudson Bay keeps us on ice longer).

3.  It's actually been uglier in some parts before:

4.  As you can see from the map, there are people in Montana and Alberta that have experienced in actual temperatures what we whine about regarding wind chill further east.  They have airports there too, not to mention freeways and schools, but manage to survive.

5.  Don't think this leaves us out of the water as far as "no more normal winters" are concerned.  We could very well have another scorcher of a summer with next to no rain, like California is current experiencing.  I think they got an inch in parts today, but you know what I mean.  A day of rain hardly makes up for a year without it.  What's that, you say, not every part of the world is frozen right now?  Indeed.  We are experiencing a lot of extremes.  Our continent is no stranger to periodic extremes, true, but prolonged?

6.  You can probably panic a little bit at that thought.  Still, wait to see how the next few winters turn out before declaring victory of your opposition in the climactic political game.  It's cold, but not outrageously so, nor is it normal.  This is a spike in overall trends.

Just throwing some of this out there... in the meantime we can explore more of what cold means.

2013: The Cool Wet One

2012 began with one of the mildest winters in memory.  Here in quintessentially southern Great Lakes South Lyon, Michigan we managed to see our lowest mercury reading a chilly 6 below zero Fahrenheit, but that was a brief adventure into a winter which saw January days well into the sixties and found March acting more like July, even giving us a tornado which we would not have expected until May.  This was followed by a July that acted more like we were in the desert Southwest, complete with 105 degree heat for weeks at a time and absolutely not a cloud in sight.  A sudden frost came in mid-September, rather early for this part of the Lakes, but it was followed by sixties well into December.  This all followed a 2011 which saw extremes of daytime highs in the thirties down as far south as Miami but also record breaking rains just about everywhere.  Not so 2012, which was bone dry and brought drought even to the entire length of the humidity factory known as the Gulf Coast.  Then too, there was Hurricane Sandy, a tropical-strength maelstrom of immense geographical scope; I witnessed the edge of the outer bands passing by here in Michigan. 

Then came 2013, a year in which extremes got altogether left behind, at least this far north.  Not so down south, where tornadoes were reported in January.  Up north we witnessed neither intense cold nor intense heat, but a lack of spring, a lack of summer, and a confused fall.  A killing frost happened in late May, but the growing season managed to last without a killing closer frost in mid-November.  My birthday and the start of the third year of this blog came along with much of my garden was still in bloom, followed by a deep freeze well below normal into the single digits, a freeze that we have risen above for only a few brief days thus far.  Out west single digits blasted the otherwise mild-winter Mojave desert, with St. George, Utah being buried under well over a foot of, get this, wet eastern-style snow.  Unlike in the storm of 2008, the snow stuck around for some time.  Again, however, the rest of the year was punctuated less by extremes than by moderation.  Much of July in southern Michigan was sitting in the upper fifties, ambushed here and there by a few days of summer heat.  Summer almost never came in the first place, with snow happening well into May.  This fall we had sixties from late August until mid-November, and unlike the previous year, we had little to show for it in foliage color.  The trees just seemed to give out almost instantly and without much warning. 

All the while we had the intense drought of 2012 beaten to a pulp in all but parts of California, Nevada, and a tiny corner of south western Oklahoma which has seemed to suffer intensely for the experience.  Rain kept falling, our Lakes seemed to rebound nicely, and the snow seems to have remembered that it belongs here this time of year.  Down South I certainly encountered rain, the likes of which fell in such intensity that I have never seen anywhere else.  This made for treacherous driving, a rather humid jaunt through coastal South Carolina, and a mosquito-empowered trip through Congaree National Park. 

While it is a floodplain, the swamp along the boardwalk in Congaree is not exactly a huge body of standing water.  In this wet year, however, things were very mucky even into June.

Which, by the way, we can continue down the boardwalk on now that the holidays are over.  My dear readers, thanks for continuing to visit us here and to discover more of the continent.  Despite my lack of presence over a good deal of the year, you made this the most visited thus far. 

GAAHHH! TORNADO!

Two years ago I was passing through Joplin, Missouri.  Only a month had passed since the town was almost entirely destroyed by an F-5 tornado.  Like most people everywhere else, I was nothing but full of sympathy for what had happened to the people there, but like most people, I also let the event slip into the back of my mind as the weeks went on.  I was very sharply reminded about what had happened; most hotels in the area were either closed, packed full of relief workers and displaced locals, or no longer standing.  What had seemed like a convenient stopping place for the night on a long trip from California to Michigan turned into a reminder that we live on a continent that is very, very naturally destructive.  Overhead information signs directed a ton of relief workers into action, with an entire exit off of I-44 dedicated just to outside assistance entering what was left of the city.  I took no pictures of what little could be seen from the interstate, which was horrific.  Trees, buildings, everything... flattened. 

So how does the sort of thing happen, how did people in the past deal with it, what should we do about it, etc?  I figured I would wait to post anything about tornadoes until the media hysteria had died down regarding the recent Oklahoma disasters, but seeing as how I just encountered a weak tornado of my own a few days ago, now seemed to be as good a time as any.  Tornadoes, more than most natural disasters, seem to make people rubber-neck and dive into as much information on the matter as possible.  The press, therefore, jump all over the tragedies involved as fast as they can and a lot of rapid speech and decrying of the fury of nature runs out of the mouths of many a reporter.  For the most part, though, they get their facts straight. 

Tornadoes are the result of colliding air masses within a larger storm system causing a bunch of air to rapidly rotate.  The winds that result within really powerful tornadoes, such as the one which hit Joplin, are among the most powerful winds on our planet, making hurricanes seem mild in comparison.  Hurricanes, in fact, can spawn multiple tornadoes within them, something which happens often in the Carolinas and Georgia when the storms make landfall there.  While one imagines a tornado to suck everything out of existence, its damaging effects are actually the result of the rotating winds knocking around debris which can include entire houses, trees, and trucks.  Nevertheless, as I can confirm from personal experience, one does feel as if one is being sucked off the ground into the blue, or rather gray and lightning illuminated yonder. 

(Before anyone asks, this happened on I-80, at the only tollbooths in Illinois for I-80.  The car I was in was lifted a few feet off the ground before it was thankfully plunked back down just a foot or so in front of where it lifted off.  Yes, I thought I was going to die.  I have also been within a few hundred feet of an F-5 tornado at the corner of where Nebraska and Colorado meet near Ogallala, Nebraska, and more recently a small rope tornado near Whitmore Lake, Michigan.) 

So why do they happen so often here?  You know that bit about air masses doing a dance?  It just so happens that North America is one of the most chaotic battlegrounds for air masses coming in contact with one another.  In the north we have Hudson Bay, which together with our large continental mass (oceans tend to moderate temperatures, dry land tends to let them go nuts in one direction or another) extends cold air masses much closer to the equator than anywhere else on earth.  Frosts have been reported as far south as Tampico, Mexico, clearly in the tropics.  During the last ice age, the frigid Hudson kept pumping out glacial masses of ice that extended closer to the equator than any other non-alpine location on the planet.  In the other corner, the Gulf of Mexico is a heat and humidity factory wherein the great global ocean thermal conveyer belt (say that five times fast) suddenly turns from deep and cold to shallow and hot.  It produces the Gulf Stream which tends to make Europe a pleasant place in terms of temperature moderation.  It also gives the eastern part of our continent our amazing forests and plentiful water.  It also gives us summer days where we can practically watch the paint peel off of the walls because everything is so damn sticky. 

Now, put the two of these together and we get amazing storms.  Make the already very different layers of the atmosphere dance with even greater surface extremes between those larger air masses and we get our destructive tornadoes.  Sure, they get them in Europe now and then, they get them in China (where they have a scaled down version of our hot-cold fight between Siberia and the South China Sea), they get them in the tropics, and they even get them on top of mountains, but nowhere near the intensity and frequency with which they happen in central North America.  Oklahoma is the worst place to be for this sort of thing.  A small part of the state's southeastern corner has a climate and landscape very similar to the rest of the classic "South", complete with palmettos and bald cypresses.  The middle of the state is a rapid transition between forested east and dry open plains, so much so that the space of a few miles can actually turn from big sky country into "hey, where did these trees pop up from?", and that big sky country out west is really dry compared to the eastern side. Winter time can feature decent 50's near Arkansas to sub-zero chills in the panhandle.

Texas panhandle, near the Oklahoma border, US 83 southbound. 

I-44 between near Oklahoma City, not much over 100 miles east and a very different world.

As a result, the winds tend to dance a lot in Oklahoma.  The process does happen just as violently, however, in the rest of the area of the great meeting of air masses.  Though not nearly as frequent, tornadoes are a good possibility during the summer storm system all the way up in Ontario and Pennsylvania.  The Ohio and Tennessee river valleys, full of rolling, wooded landscapes, are hardly what people think of as a prime tornado region, and yet the get tornadoes that can sometimes stay on the ground for well over a hundred miles. 

So good grief, we say, and why do people live there, we ask?  People have lived there for over 10,000 years actually.  The practice of living was a bit different, mind you.  The Pawnees, Osage, and other prairie peoples tended to be a bit more mobile than modern prairie people tend to be.  The main reason for this was a food culture based on the plentiful game of the prairies and one in which the drier region could not necessarily be counted on to offer the same bounty as the corn and squash fields back east could.  Even in the lush climate times of the middle ages, when peoples in the Ohio and Mississippi valleys and southern Great Lakes were building sizable cities with elaborate earth works and farming quite a bit, the plains peoples kept on following the buffalo.  Why?  Probably because a giant hand would come out of the sky and flatten everything in sight.  The Lakota, who originally hailed from Minnesota and northwestern Ontario, abandoned their more permanent settlements when they got chased onto the plains hundreds of years ago by the Ojibwe.  This didn't last forever, of course.  The second born came from the east and started planting permanent settlements.  I often wonder if the first Euro-Americans would have stayed had there been F-5 tornadoes in Jamestown or Quebec...

Initially settlers built half-buried, sod topped houses.  They were easier to make without having to haul in wood from the east, tended to be cooler, and in some cases even afforded a little bit more protection from the violent storms of the great big open sky.  The early prairie pioneers were a tough sort of folk, and many would-be Kansans and Nebraskans turned away screaming when they had to deal with the rugged life on the plains.  Some went back east, many just passed through to places with more promise like California.  Eventually, however (this is the WHY do people live there now bit), improved plows made farming a simpler affair, the legendary tough tallgrass sod being broken by the steel hand of Mr. John Deere.  Free land through the homestead act made the region increasingly attractive, and, well, money talks.  There are cities there now, rather large ones, and economic opportunities keep calling people away from the unemployment of the rust belt. That aside, the area is incredibly beautiful.  Long, open sightlines and a grand drama of the sky, which as you can see in the Texas picture above, is often far more inviting than it is discouraging. 

People tended to bring with them the comforts of home when the wild west became a bit less wild.  Wood frame houses sprang up, and planted trees made little towns feel more like the beloved Virginia or New York that had been left behind.  Yes, storms and drought came along to spook people, but many stayed and some even returned when they became complacent and forgetful.  Like I noted, it took less than a month for Joplin to sit in the back of my mind.  I dare say that is pretty average for people who don't get affected by tornadoes, and I have actually been intimate with three.  Besides, some towns have been around for quite some time and managed to either survive or not see large scale destruction.

Elk City, Oklahoma, main street.  Many of these buildings are from the early twentieth century and look like they have made it OK.

 People recover.  People rebuild.  Plains people and (true) Midwesterners are built from tough stock, so the saying goes.  What can we do about them, or better put, what we can we do in such regions to better handle the big wind?  As any southern Floridian can tell you, wood does not cut it in the face of powerful forces.  While Miami is turning just as wood frame and vinyl sided as the rest of the country, the historical trend for building to resist hurricanes down there was concrete construction.  Sure, an F5 is an F5, but concrete can handle way more than fragile wood can.  In the meantime, donate to the Red Cross to help those who got a pretty potent reminder that we are not always in charge of the world around us.  Better yet, donate in a month's time when the need will still be great and the money flood will slow to a trickle because we all forget about what happened. 

And again, yes, tornadoes are terrifying to be in, and yet also strangely beautiful.  That's how I feel about them anyway.

The Persistence of Snow

Back in the week before Christmas, I was lamenting how winter seems to be a fleeting bonus feature to the colder months of the year, at least across most of temperate North America.  Now the southern Great Lakes finds themselves covered in a nice foot tall blanket of snow that has thus far managed to survive nearly two weeks intact, with only two days managing to partially melt any of it.  During the initial snowfalls, we had lovely scenery: our majestic oaks, hickories, maples, ashes, and willows were gently draped with marshmallow puffs of powder.  The small amount of naturally occurring cedar or pine that we have here in southeastern Michigan (and of course all the cultivated masses of spruce) added a nice splash of green and "north" to a scene that was otherwise expected to be dull, muddy, and of limited color.  This transformation got me thinking about something my imagination has always been ready to venture into, yet not quite sure how to handle.

Just what was the last major glaciation like, and how was it even possible?

Many of our scientists tell us that the Laurentide Ice Sheet was over a mile tall and covered the continent from the far north all the way down to central Ohio.  These same people also tell us that a shift of only a few degrees in average global temperature could reproduce this, or worse, in the other direction, it could turn our little green and blue marble into something a bit more brown and toasty.  On the surface, it sounds pretty sketchy and dubious at best.  After all, Climate Change is but one of the many issues in our lives that has been bitten by the political vampire and turned into an ugly beast that ever polarizing sides want to keep fighting on.  That said, we do have quite a bit of evidence out there to show that we really did have an ice age within the last ten milennia, among the favorite of mine being the fact that Britain is rising in Scotland and sinking in southern England.  The same thing is happening here in North America, with the most apparent place of rebound being in extreme northern Ontario along the Hudson Bay lowlands.  That's right.  Apparently we had so much white stuff crushing down on the poor earth that it keeps springing back up to this present day.

Anyway, accepting for a minute that we did have an Ice Age (and yes, I am among those who say that we did have a "recent" one), well, how were things working out back then?

Things were working out very differently.

For starters, someone standing in what would become Columbus, Ohio, would not be staring at a huge wall of ice, but something more akin to a slope of, you guessed it, a glacier, that would gain elevation to the north.    There would still be seasons, and as is the case with the edge of most modern montane and polar glaciers, there would be a bit of melting going on during the warmer months, melt-water of which would find its way into the ancient versions of our modern rivers, such as the Mississippi.  At the end of its life, the Laurentide Ice Sheet would be fighting a losing battle during the summer, and the melting would produce massive channels to drain all that water back to the rising oceans, most notably in the Mississippi and Ottawa rivers and their ancient versions.  In some places, what melted would pool up.  We can thank this sort of deal for giving us the Great Lakes.  In the reverse scenario, we can probably figure that the ice sheet got its start the same way, but not melting as much during cooler summers so that winter replacement would gain the upper hand.  Basically, the war that has been forever going between the Gulf of Mexico and Hudson Bay started to turn in favor of the Bay, which kept on pushing out more ice and other white stuff further south than anywhere else in the northern hemisphere.  During the glory days for the northern team, the ice would have piled high enough to create a new climate on itself, cooled by its own elevation.

But enough about ice and giant rivers with massive rapids that would make Niagara Falls seem like a leaky faucet, what would become of all the wee critters and lovely trees?  Many of them would migrate south.

It's hard to imagine a world where one could catch Lake Trout (Salvelinus Namaycush) in Alabama or see spruce bogs along the Gulf coast, to say nothing of having a hard time finding a palm tree in Florida, but such things might have been the case.  We do know that some northeastern species of pine retreated as far south as Oaxaca down in central Mexico, relict species of which can still be found in such a place.  Today it can snow in the higher elevations around Mexico City, at least during the middle of winter around the turn of the year.  Back then, a white Christmas in the area now claimed by the city proper would not be out of the question.  Of course it would not stick around for very long, but back then the snowy winter scene I see outside would have had the upper hand much further south.

Farewell 2012

You brought North America climactic disaster in so many corners.  Nearly the entire map except portions of tropical Mexico and the Pacific northwest suffered from intense heat and prolonged drought.  You brought devastating extra-tropical hurricanes and tornadoes in the least likely months of January and December.  You  gave us a parting gift of much needed rain for California and a normal looking winter near the end of the month for much of the Midwest and Great Lakes, but aside from that we have seen extremes that seem to be getting worse.  Let's hope 2013 is a bit more gentle on us.

That said, life on this rugged continent has always been a bit more tenacious than even its rugged weather.

No White Christmas?

This past summer in southern Michigan felt more like a summer somewhere in the mid-elevation southwestern United States.  We had weeks of highs in the upper 90's, along with five day stretches here and there of 100+ temperatures.  What's more, our nights dropped down more than twenty-five degrees lower on many occasions.  The soil caked or looked more like sand, saplings fried in the hot sun, lawns looked dreadful even when watered, and the cacti I planted positively thrived.  About a month ago, I walked along the southern shores of Lake Huron... several hundred feet off shore, on dry land.  Much of the country has experienced intense heat and drought this summer.

Along came the fall, and with it a return to some rain and moderate temperatures, along with an exceptionally early freeze back in the second week of September.  Things started to level out, but then began looking like the previous winter, with days well above normal and nights not really budging that far from the highs.  Last winter featured January days in the 50's with exceptionally high humidity.  This winter has so far followed suit, with December days regularly seeing 60.  Last winter I felt that I could get away with planting a Needle Palm (Rhapidophyllum Hystrix), but wishful thinking aside, I noticed a few things this fine December 17th when I took a walk outside.  Among my botanical bursts of enthusiasm this year has been a voyage of exploration into the flora of the American southeast.  I took a gamble on growing a Sweetbay Magnolia (Magnolia Virginiana), unprotected and exposed, in the yard.  While there were a few initial hiccups with soil acidity to begin with, and the leaves have fallen off due to overnight freezes, I did notice something curious.

The air temperature near the ground usually tends to be higher than that of the air even a foot above the ground, but not so high as to, say, keep things from freezing in winter.  Winds can still blow and chill even close down to the ground, and one will notice that one's lawn does indeed stop growing this late into the season.  Well, it really has not this year, nor did it last year.  What's more, while the rest of the Magnolia went through its deciduous process (further south, say in Georgia down, they can tend towards being evergreen), new growth has been popping up here in mid-December!  Last year the lilacs did the same thing, stopping only in January and starting back up again in late February.  The Rhododendron looks amazing, and only recently did my last hosta bite the dust.  These past two winters have been experiencing climactic conditions closer to what would be normal for Kentucky or Maryland than Michigan, more humid subtropical than humid continental.

There is, of course, a down side to all of this.  Our water reserves might suffer for it, particularly where the Great Lakes are concerned.  Snow and an intense spring melt usually gives water bodies a chance to recuperate, as if all the moisture is kept safely on the ground until it can be released before getting a chance to evaporate again.  Out west, our Rockies have seen less and less snowfall, and rivers such as the Colorado and Rio Grande have suffered for it.

I-70 eastbound, about 9,000 feet up.  Near Georgetown, Colorado.

Time will tell whether this is a permanent change or not.  For now, those of wanting snow need to head north of the 44 parallel or so.

California Refilling

Even as much of the country is still recovering from a brutal 2012 of heat and drought, much of non-desert California is experiencing record rainfall, some parts receiving 800% of their normal amounts in mere hours.  Instead of the devastating floods that come with such intense bursts of precipitation, the rain is going to the right areas and recharging aquifers and lakes.  This has been needed for a very long time.

Lake Kaweah, near Visalia, California, Sierra Nevada foothills.  Though the lake is often drained to a lower level for flood control, the sad truth is that many lakes in California have looked like this for a long time.  

If this continues to some degree through the winter, the deserts, which get winter rainfall anyway, will experience a bloom worthy of taking the most skeptical person's breath away.  2013 will be a year of plenty of water for California, hopefully along with a renewed appetite for better water management practices there.

The Heat is On

100 degrees in places like Michigan, Ontario, and Wisconsin comes around now and then, but when it does, it tends to be an abnormal, rather than frequent, occurrence.  Thus far this summer, we have had a handful of such days, and they have been coupled with a distressing lack of rain.  Lawns are well past the point of surrender, but now creeks are also starting to run a bit dry and even some of the deeper local lakes are becoming more akin to bathwater than something refreshing.  This has come to us on top of a rather mild winter, with some days in January even sitting well into the 60's.  Furthermore, this is part of a trend of a see-saw of extremes that have visited the world in the past two decades.  Rather than enter a harsh debate about climate change, however, I think what is needed most here would be some refreshing pictures of cold things.

With the recently devastated Rockies in mind, let's head to happier times in Colorado, from a better winter a few years ago.  First we can see some snow!

Vail Pass, Colorado, May 2010.

 Lovely stuff at near 10,000 feet, which sadly, did not happen much if at all even at these altitudes this past winter.  The spires you see there are either Engelmann Spruce (Picea Engelmannii) or Subalpine Fir (Abies Lasiocarpa), and it can be hard to tell with such a heavy snowpack holding down the rising branches the spruces would normally carry.  The Rocky Mountain forests are truly lovely, a great example of how massed individual species can really add to the beauty of an expansive landscape.  While variety is the spice of life and biodiversity is a very good thing, there is nothing like seeing a forest of spires like this or in the boreal north, where these trees are replaced by Balsam Fir (Abies Balsamea) and Black Spruce (Picea Mariana).  I promised I would not go on about climate change, right?  Well the truth of the matter is that these forests are actually disappearing before our very eyes as things get too warm for them and conditions in which they would otherwise flourish are heading further north or upwards.  While forests might retreat, they also have to deal with an increase in wildfires and insect attacks that their colder environments used to help keep in check.  See that snowpack?  Even for May, it is a bit low.  Our colder years now are what were once average.  The heat is on, indeed.

I-70 Eastbound exiting the Eisenhower Tunnels, just to the east of the Continental Divide.  11,100 feet up high!

The Great Mojave Snowstorm of 2008

With the possible exception of taking an extremely southerly route through Mexico, there is no guaranteed safe passage across North American in the wintertime in the worst of years.  Yes, one can assume that travel along the Gulf will not result in encountering any sudden blasts of winter weather, but even Houston and New Orleans have seen nights in the 20s and a good blast of snow now and then.  Likewise, despite encountering some of the driest lands in the world moving further west, the desert seems to forget it is a desert sometimes, and otherwise bone dry, 110+ degree locations in the summer can turn into frigid deathtraps in which the local driving population is sorely unprepared.  In December 2008 in the Mojave Desert, the land became blanketed with well over two feet of snow.  

Now, yes, those are desert evergreen plants in that picture, and what you see is a normally toasty portion of the Mojave outside of Baker, California.  The snow also persisted for over a week, with temperatures remaining low for the duration.  It was a strange event, all the more so because everything else on the trans-continental trip had not at all prepared me for an actual blizzard.  Yes, there was an absolute terror of a snowstorm in the Rockies, and yes, the higher elevations around a place as close as Cedar City, Utah, were frigid in the single digits, but 30 miles later, a descent into the Mojave raised the temperatures into the 50s and the snow was melted, leaving the red landscape of St. George and environs even more brilliant than normal.  I did not have an unreasonable expectation in assuming that the even lower Las Vegas would feature similar milder conditions.  Instead, a blizzard ripped across I-15 near the end of the strip.

Yes, this is really Las Vegas, Nevada.  Let me tell you, the rates on rooms were amazing that night!

This was a really interesting experience, to say the least.  At the start of the descent into Las Vegas Valley, the external thermometer on the car was reading 46 degrees.  A drop from St. George's high of 50, but not a surprising one considering that there were fewer gaps in the clouds.  Then the numbers kept getting lower every mile until Las Vegas was reporting a chilly 32.  I wondered when the few raindrops falling from the now solid cloud sky would turn to snow, and sure enough, the normally baked landscape played host to a fair impression of a Great Lakes blizzard.  

Now, again, we are a cold continent.  Frost has been reported everywhere throughout our land except the Florida Keys, a thin strip of coastline in extreme southern California, and the tropical parts of Mexico (though even a place as far south as Tampico has seen it).  Jacksonville, Florida has seen snowfalls of several inches that managed to stick around for a while, and the last few years have seen arctic outbreaks which have threatened the citrus crops in the state.  At the same time, while these are not entirely unexpected occurrences, they are also not normal by any stretch of the imagination.  An average December day in the Mojave sits anywhere from the mid-50s to lower 60s, depending on elevation.  Some of the higher rises in the desert might see a dusting now and then, but it is hardly persistent.  The pools in Las Vegas stay open all year, and palm trees are a reality of landscaping throughout the region.  Worst of all, they do not have snow plows at the ready around these parts, and I-15 became a parking lot at the border with California.  This, of course, led to a night in Vegas and a chance to see what happens to palms in the snow.

This would be the famous "Whiskey Pete's" in tourist tr... er Primm, Nevada.  The hotel was packed with stalled travelers.  

Let me tell you, palms and snow do not mix.  Your hardly desert dwellers like the California Fan Palm (Washingtonia Filifera) and such are used to the occasional upset like this, but they still get weighed down and look very, very sad.  In the same fashion, the local drivers know that things are more dangerous when frozen and slushy, but like the palms bent under the weight of the snow, they cannot help but apply their defenses and hardiness with a lack of grace and hit the brakes hard enough to get locked into some truly embarrassing fish-tailing.  Again, this can happen, but it rarely does, but then it also gets remembered.  While it might be convenient to blame climate change for a mess like this (and the frequency of such events does tend to support the theories out there), the fact is that travelers have historically encountered such shocking visits from Father Winter.  Juan Bautista de Anza and his expedition, in fact, encountered one heck of a snowstorm down in the warmer Sonoran Desert not far from Palm Springs, California!  

Southbound I-15 approaching the 4,900 foot pass that in the Mescal range near the California/Nevada border.

 Travel inconveniences aside, the snow tends to melt pretty quickly in the lower elevations and urban areas.  By the next day, downtown Las Vegas had chunks of ice in the shadows of buildings, but not much in the way of snow except a little dusting on the grass and in the trees.  The higher elevations, though, like the mountains pictured above near Ivanpah Dry Lake in southern California, continued to carry a load of the white stuff well into the next week.  The result was stunning, to say the least, and even left dry lakes like Ivanpah with a bit of water in them for a while.

The Heat Continues, and the Water Does Not

In the past week lower Michigan was finally blessed with some deep, soaking rains that persisted for several hours on separate occasions.  The problem is, this was not nearly enough to keep us out of some rather dry conditions.  Other places have been hit far worse, and the wildfire season is out of control as an abundance of dry fuel is turning parts of the Rockies, Utah, and California into hell on earth.  The continent already is a rather dry place, even in our wettest locations, and the life here has adapted somewhat to droughts which are never far around the corner.  Our deserts, for instance, are some truly amazing places that see some of the hottest temperatures on the planet, as well as some of the least precipitation, and yet are often abundantly full of life that makes the best of the situation.

Some of the desert dwellers, in fact, are studies in extremes themselves.  Take the California Fan Palm (Washingtonia Filifera), for instance, which is only found in the deserts, and then only at areas where they are rooted in wet soils owing to a small rising of groundwater along fault lines that creates small oases.

Taken at the Oasis of Mara, Twentynine Palms, California.

Yes, that is indeed standing water in the middle of those palms, right in the middle of an otherwise bone dry desert.  The palms grow because of it, and they also help shade the water from otherwise evaporating as soon as it hits the surface.  Further east, we have wonderful things like prairie fens that have similar water loving species that can take full exposure to the sun and summer heat without much in the way of regular rainfall.  I have to admit, this post was inspired by the triple digits we experienced here today, and looking out at a parched lawn that looks far less impressive than a fen or oasis and has grass on it that was probably not meant for this part of the world, 40 inches of regular precipitation or not.  This is yet another reason for those of who live here to go native and plant more trees and other things that do belong here.

When the Beach Seems Like a Good Idea...

...everyone else will be there too.  Much of the continent is baking today, with even some of the Cree towns around James and Hudson Bay reporting in 80+ degree weather.  Some areas in Kansas and Oklahoma are calling in 108 degrees, which is actually the same temperature that Death Valley is reporting!  The map below illustrates how hot we are getting, and it also shows where some of the natural features of the continent (well, the United States anyway) are fighting back against the sweltering mess.

As we can see, the mountain ranges are somewhat effective at walling off the heat, or at least keeping it off of themselves.  The Great Lakes are dulling the northward push a little bit, at least by a few degrees, and much further where the deep cool waters of Traverse Bay are knocking things down into the seventies.  Florida is not suffering too much either, as the hot and humid waters surrounding it seem to be effective enough in holding off both the extremes of hot and cold alike.  The northwestern states, as usual, are blessed by being blocked in both by highly prominent mountain ranges and a cold northern Pacific Ocean which carries the California Current past its shores, which also benefits immediate coastal areas as far south as Tijuana.

That in mind, I would love to be here right now:

That would be South Laguna Beach, where the sea is a cool 65 degrees and the air is holding at about 72, and yet sunshine and palm trees still hold dominion.  Like I said, though, most of the Los Angeles metro area is probably thinking the same thing.  Southern California, at least on the coast, is a dream destination for those seeking summer moderation.  The beaches are wonderful, usually completely natural, and have fun things like the tide pools and sea caves that protrude from the land at the top of the picture.

In case you were wondering, those are Mexican Fan Palms (Washingtonia Robusta) towering over the parking lot, and yes, they are exotic to the area, but not entirely alien, as they naturally grow within a couple of hundred miles to the south of here in canyons of Baja California.  The municipal authorities in the region have plans to not replant these things (which have naturalized anyway) in order to create more a more native, shady landscaping "theme".  While I do think this is mostly a good idea, the palms take up so little space and use relatively little water.  They handle the salt spray pretty well, and let's face it, a palm tree on a beach or in the region's lovely sunsets is just a pleasant thing.

Anyway, find some friends, form up a car pool ride or take some mass transit, and hit the beach or some place close to a large body of water or a higher elevation and have a new appreciation for such places.

Before and After in the Mojave

This is the Mojave desert about 18 miles west of Mesquite, Nevada:

This is what happens when it gets some rain:

Defining the Not-Midwest: Climate

The interior lowlands of the United States are characterized by a largely humid continental climate.  This means that the vast landmass of North America produces winters in the region that are cold, sometimes downright frigid, and a bit on the drier side.  At the same time, the Gulf of Mexico, perhaps the most powerful humidity factory in the world, aside from the South China Sea, sends north a lot of hot, extremely humid air.  This produces not only the sweltering summers of the region, but also a conflicting air mass, that, when colliding with the continental air masses, spawns some of the most violent non-oceanic storms in the world.  While these two contenders are normally the main event in weather showdowns in everything east of the Rockies, there are alternative influences that sit on the sidelines ready for the tag to get into the action.  The greatest of these, at least in the northeastern United States and parts of Ontario and Quebec, would be the Great Lakes.

The lakes are huge, hundreds of feet deep, and as such rarely freeze over in the winter.  Lake Superior and Lake Michigan have never reported total ice coverage, though Michigan came close in the late seventies.  Open water has a tendency to moderate air masses that pass over them, even if the water is on the colder side.  For Michigan, northern Ohio, northwestern Pennsylvania, southern Ontario, and western New York (see a theme here yet?), this gives such places air conditioning in the summer, and longer growing seasons as well as moderation of arctic air masses in the winter.  Also of note in the winter, the areas within sixty miles or so of open water can see massive amounts of snow thrown upon them, called lake effect snow.  Rainfall totals are higher here than in other parts of the interior, often by as much as 10 inches per annum.  In terms of normal interior weather, these areas largely see quite different effects than much of the rest of the land does.  Tornadoes are possible in Michigan, Ontario, and northern Ohio, but they are often much smaller in raw power than the terrors that can strike places like Joplin and St. Louis.  Storms, waves of extreme temperature, even relative sunshine, they all get muted by the Lakes.  Sometimes it even seems as if air masses tend to stick within state lines.  Just look at Wisconsin and Michigan here!

Or for those curious about how this works in the winter, take a look at this map:

Obviously Ohio is behind an arcing front, and is thus colder than Indiana, but Michigan?  Not so much.  Yes, Lake Michigan is quite the attractive piece of water.  The Lakes influence the temperatures of these lands enough to give places like the Grand Traverse area of Michigan and the Niagara frontier of New York and Ontario a growing season comparable to what can be found in Kentucky or New Jersey.  If this sounds like a stretch, one need merely venture out among the extensive orchards and vines of these otherwise northerly latitudes.  Niagara-on-the-Lake, in fact, actually has a climate that supports several species of cold-hardy palms.  The peak fall foliage times is often late October and early November.  Best of all, spring blossoms last much longer.

So, what does this mean for the Midwest and Not-Midwest besides what will fall from the sky and how warm things will be?  Come by next post to see what defines the differences between these regions in terms of geography.

The Desert that Never Quits

It was so lovely out today.  Nearly 70, in Michigan, in March!  Needless to say, I felt weather inspired, so try this on for size:

The weather in the Mojave desert has been weird, to say the least, for the last seven years or so.  In 2005, many of the salt flats throughout the region were full of water that persisted well into the summer, including Badwater Basin at Death Valley, which ordinarily receives a meager 2 inches of rain a year.  In the winter of 2008-2009, several feet of snow fell throughout all but the lowest elevations of the desert.  Joshua trees and California fan palms were covered in snow and ice, and things got bad enough in places that interstate 15 had to close a few times.  This past late June, things were still on the wet and cool side, as the below picture will demonstrate.

Normally, by this time of year, temperatures would be hitting the triple digits and there would be not a cloud in the sky.  The ground would be bare, except for the creosote bushes (Larrea Tridentata).  Instead you can see that there was still grass everywhere, the sky was overcast, and I can assure you that temperatures were hovering in the upper forties, at midday no less.  The strangest thing had to be that while the sky was misting, and even raining pretty steady in some parts, the desert was not about to give up its superiority to uppity weather patterns.  Dust storms were blowing across the flats even as the sky opened up and had been soaking sand back into something that was not quite soil.

As you can see, the camera was wet, and it was raining both over me and in the right foreground, where the dust was also kicking up and some of that surviving winter grass cover was getting covered by sand.  That's what is so wonderful about the Mojave; the Sonoran desert might have the more interesting cacti and other plant life, but the Mojave can freeze, boil, flood, and dry up in the wind all in the same day.  The hottest temperature I have ever been in outdoors, 117F, I experienced here.  The most powerful snowfall, 14 inches in two hours, that I have ever experienced was here.  By and large, the Mojave has otherwise been behaving normally, but the extremes that have been going on for the past few years have been downright strange.  Nevertheless, the desert here likes to resist change, and even when it has been a bit greener or browner than normal, the flora and landscape have hardly given in.  The locals certainly know it; this remains one of the most sparsely populated areas of the United States, right next to one of the mostly densely packed urban regions on the entire planet.

Sunday Afternoon Post: Back to the East

Today will be the start or a wonderful tradition of not writing too much on a Sunday, mainly because I wrote too much yesterday.  

What is the primary difference between western and eastern North America?  Water.

In this case, as if the forests were not indication enough (not many hickories and white oaks back in Utah or Nevada), there are sometimes huge thunderheads, and not the weak kind that growl once and leave during the Arizona "monsoon".  No, this is Missouri, right near about where northern continental air masses meet Gulf air masses.  Specifically, this is I-44 eastbound about 50 miles from Saint Louis.  

The route is a lovely drive, very hilly, not quite hillbilly, not quite mid-western, not quite much of anything clear cut.  While not quite the true Ozarks, the northern edge of them is a nice, green, rolling invitation back to the humid and temperate east.  

I had always envisioned Saint Louis as being your typical big Mississippi city prone to flooding and stretched out across a gentle landscape, when in fact it is rather compact for a city its size and located in a rather scenic area.  

They do indeed have a river.

And even a giant arch!

Let's head north tomorrow.