The Weather Thread

[brite]

It's freaking COLD!








carry on....

[cid]

They've been warning us for a couple days that all hell was about to break loose...
Today was gonna be a 'me' day (oh, do I ever need one -- finals week, y'know...), but the phone rang,
and Mom had a sawbones appt on the far south side of town, and it'd been sleeting and spitting and
snowing since last nite, so I got pressed into service as chauffeur...
It was/is pretty ugly out there, so it's a good thing I did the driving. Had the local AM traffic/weather station
blaring, and the list of wrecks grew seemingly exponentially. As we left the doc's office, there was a group of police
cars up on the overpass, you'd think a donut truck overturned...

It's time to trashbag the car to prevent freezing. How does one do this?
Put a trashbag over the top of the door from the inside -- fold about two inches over the top
and around the non-hinge side with the rest inside the car. OK to lock the door. Now, if things freeze,
they freeze to the door/bag surface -- but the inside surfaces of the bag don't stick to each other,
so they release and the door still opens!!

Take four of those long tubular plastic bags your newspaper is delivered in.
Stick one bag inside the other (you now have a pair of double-bags).
Stick those over your windshield wipers. Same deal...you don't have to chip
your wipers loose in the morning!!

Been doing the door thing for ages. The cross-street neighbor gave me the
wiper/bag tip last winter. Saves a lot of aggravation and frozen fingertips
when it's time to excavate the car...

Hope the roads improve by Sunday. Road trip to Toledo to visit nephew-in-jail...

Currently snowing, temp 26F, and no improvement seen for the next few days.

[pumpkinpi]

It's a $12 cold today, meaning that's how much I'm willing to pay for parking to cut my walk from my usual lot ($4) to my office from 4 blocks to 1/2 block. Bottomed out at -7 while I was driving in.

Not that I shouldn't expect this in Minnesota, and that it won't still get colder this season. But we haven't been out of the single digits for a week now. I've never experienced this cold for this long!

There are still many bikers on the road though. Oh, did I mention the roads are crusty and icy because it snowed 5" just before the deep freeze came, which made it very hard to clear them? I don't know how they do it in such harsh conditions. But that may some day be me. In a few years my office may move from 4 miles away to less than a mile. I do not intend to drive, because I'd have to walk half the distance back from the lot! So in weather like this, I can choose between a 20 minute walk and a 5 minute bike ride. I'll take the latter. In addition, the walk home after dark this time of year would be poorly lit, so I'd be safer on the bike.

[Swift]

Tomorrow I have to drive to the Detroit area (one of my wife's cousins just passed away) and they are predicting 4 to 6" of snow all across Northern Ohio. Oh goody.

[Rommie]

Be careful!

[cid]

Early season rumors were that this would be a winter to remember...well...

Been a tad brisk, hangin' in the low 20's -- high 'teens, with a shot at single digits at night now and then.
Snowed real good about 10 days back, and with things as they are, I think it'll be there until spring. Can't remember permanent
snow this early...
Break line for weather in this neck of the woods is the 40th parallel, which comes out to US40/I70 around here (ask Thumper).
2"-6" in the northern reaches, 3"-5" just north of the I70 corridor, rain south of I70. Above freezing. Sloppy...

Gotta dig the pitcher off the camera, but I did some public service at The Santa Run (5k) today...I have a nice shot of some runners
going down the street, passing a guy using a snowblower on the sidewalk...funny? It was to plotz...

[FZR1KG]

We had some fun with snow the other day.
It snowed pretty hard.
So the cars got covered in about four inches of snow.
Then overnight there was an inversion layer and we got freezing rain.
So it rained and turned the snow into ice.

I woke up to the car being covered in a mix of solid ice and snow.
It looked like it was caught in a glacier but managed to break free.
Not so easy to get pictures of though.

The frozen spider webs were fascinating too.

While observing all this and clearing the car I remembered CiD and the plastic bag trick to stop the doors from freezing.
First time I could have used such advise and I missed the opportunity. LOL

[code monkey]

finally back into the mid-high 30's after a week of teens and 20's, snow and icy roads. a relief not to come down to a car frosted over.

[Rommie]

Nary a snowflake here yet (and it's only gotten down to freezing maybe once). But I hear it snowed in Egypt for the first time in 120+ years...

The dark is really more what defines and what I hate about the northern winters. Sunrise is around 845am and sunset is a little before 430 now, so the nights just last forever.

[FZR1KG]

Yeah but summer daylight is awesome!

[pumpkinpi]

We're still in the deep freeze. My family is here from out of town, staying in a hotel. Buster and his cousins are at the pool, and alternating between a roll in the snow at 5degrees and the hot tub!

[cid]

The old year ended mildly -- mid 30's, crazy people running a 5k out Beavercreek way, me sitting in my car with a radio watching to see if anyone
tripped over their shoelaces...

Now?

6" of snow, mid 'teens, blowing&drifting for the next two days, and temps early next week projected to -10 and colder.
The car goes in for a radiator flush&fill in the morning -- she's got 85k on her and its the original stuff in there.
Even though the mfr says it's good to 150k, I start getting a bit nervous when it's gonna get that cold.
Mom's bailin' for AZ just in time...

[pumpkinpi]

I'm sending the cold your way! Starting Saturday night we may have 84 straight hours subzero. And we've already been struggling to get more than a couple degrees above all this week.

[FZR1KG]

Way too cold for me.
No idea how you can handle it.
I hear below a certain temperature you can throw a cup of boiling water in the air and it turns to snow.
Pretty sure you're either there or not far off that.

[Thumper]

It was 1 (F) this morning outside my window. Just couldn't quite make it down to 0.

[pumpkinpi]

The Governor has ordered all k-12 schools to close on Monday due to severe cold. It'll be a low of -20 and the windchills will be from -40 to -60.

[pumpkinpi]

Way too cold for me.
No idea how you can handle it.
I hear below a certain temperature you can throw a cup of boiling water in the air and it turns to snow.
Pretty sure you're either there or not far off that.

Not snow, but a cloud. Check out the first 2 minutes of this video.
http://www.startribune.com/video/37681909.html

It simulates what happens when you take water vapor and put it in the air--it cools, condenses, and makes a visible cloud.

The video was made 5 years ago,when the weather was as cold in MN as it is now. The visual isn't that impressive, IMO, but it still gets the point across.

[Rommie]

Just flew into Chicago- here for a weekend before flying home Sunday night to visit friends, but also I was flying with two different airlines and I knew this time of year you never know just how flights will go, so I like to build a buffer. (So with luck I'm out before the cold snap!)

Holy crap the weather was bad here, even by Chicago standards. Was offered $500 to not fly in until Monday (would've taken it if not for that other flight), and in O'Hare there were several hundred people waiting in line for the service desk at United, stretching several gates in the terminal.

I confess whenever faced with how crappy United is btw as an airline I always think of She Who Must Not Be Named, and think it can't just be a coincidence.

[Thumper]

American sucks worse.
It was 45 yesterday and I was shoveling the last of the slush off the concrete in shorts. Then it started raining. Switched to snow somewhere in the middle of the night. Got a whole inch! 14F when I got up and windy. I was the only one moving. The Kid's school called off last night as well as Mrs. T's office. Once again, never heard of a "snow day" until I moved here...

[Morrolan]

it's cold here too! it was down to 24C (75F) last week!

[SciFi Chick]

it's cold here too! it was down to 24C (75F) last week!

And if we still had the kiya you'd be getting slapped by that too. :p

[FZR1KG]

Yeah. I'm not used to this cold stuff. -15C overnight, -8C as a high. Screw that.
Picking up steel is interesting. Hands stick to it. It's like being spiderman. I'm sure I could crawl up walls just by spitting on my palms all the way up.
I feel for all you lot that have it colder than what we have. I feel cold just thinking about it.

[geonuc]

8 degF in Atlanta. That ain't right. I don't think I've seen it that low in the sixteen years I've lived here.

[Rommie]

Yesterday was the second-warmest day ever in the Netherlands- got to 17C (today will be a degree or two less than that). Really weird to find yourself in the middle of spring after just fleeing the USA! (Sunset is still at 430pm to remind you it's friggin' January tho.)

Weird as it is to see the first flowers here and there, it's probably not the best thing though.

[geonuc]

8 degF in Atlanta. That ain't right. I don't think I've seen it that low in the sixteen years I've lived here.

... and still dropping. Now 6 degF. I wonder if it will hit zero.