winter

There is a webcam at the North Pole. It's a security camera, basically, keeping an eye on all the scientific instruments that monitor weather, snow, and ice conditions at the Pole. The camera is solar powered, sensibly enough, so the picture-taking begins each year in April and continues into October. Today, polar weather is dry and sunny, perfect for snapshots, but I chose to post this image instead, from July 5, because of the hint of a rainbow in the sky.

The puddles are meltwater ponded on top of the sea ice; the Arctic Ocean itself is still completely ice-covered in this photo. Since 2002, when the first webcam recorded this phenomenon throughout the Arctic summer, meltponds have first appeared as early as mid-June and as late as August. Most years, the ponds have spread to cover most of the sea ice by mid-August, before freeze-up begins again in late August. But in 2008, for reasons unknown, only a few small ponds appeared, and they'd barely begun to spread at all when freeze-up started.

So far, melting in 2010 has followed a pattern typical of the average North Pole summer--at least average for recorded North Pole meltpond history, which dates back only to 2002.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which operates the webcam, has assembled the snapshots into videos, which are posted on Youtube. You can see the snapshots and access the videos from NOAA's Arctic Gallery website.

Sculptor Gerry Lynas prefers working in sand, but last February in New York he had no choice but to make do with snow. His "Two Feet of Snow" on W. 83rd Street in Manhattan was actually five and a half feet tall. It lasted only a day and a night; the next morning, one of the legs was in the gutter, perhaps from non-natural causes.

Lynas liked the consistency of that February 10 snowfall; he said he hadn't seen such nice, sticky sculpting snow in New York since 1977, when he built a thirty-foot wooly mammoth in Central Park.

Here's to a Memorial Day weekend of seasonably lousy snow.

Spring is roaring in; by tomorrow, we'll already have daylight saving time. Did we just dream it, all that winter stuff?

As dreams go, this one was spectacular. Here is Sixth Street NW in Washington after one of those snow events, with the National Gallery of Art in the background.

With this picture and tomorrow's, Good Morning is turning the page on winter. The groundhog and the calendar and even the weather may say differently, but the groundhog and the calendar and even the weather do not control this here Good Morning thing, so . . . Goodbye, winter.

Last month, when the depth of the snow in Reading, Pennsylvania, could be measure in cubits or furlongs or some such, many people dug their cars out and then tried to reserve the parking spots they'd dug by setting chairs in them. This is probably an inherited cultural practice; if you are born into a family that believes in claiming parking spaces with chairs, then that's what you will grow up to do. It makes good sense to you, practical sense and also moral sense. You did the work of digging the spot clear; why should somebody else who didn't shovel a single flake get to take advantage of your hard work and park their car there?

But there are also people who believe that parking spaces on a public street are public and can't be claimed by any one person. No matter what the weather, it's first come, first served at the curbside. These people may be in the minority, but they also believe their approach is rational and morally superior--and often, as in this picture, they have the city government on their side. In Reading and many other places, the city came along and took all the chairs away. This practice has the effect of inspiring people, grudgingly, to shovel out additional parking spaces as needed.

In Portland, we don't have this kind of problem. The city bans parking the night after a big snowfall, and the plows quickly scrape almost all the streets clean, curb to curb. This solution would never work in places like Reading, where there may not be enough driveways to hold cars during a street parking ban and where there surely aren't enough plows to clear the streets promptly.

So next winter, a lot of people will feel strongly that they need to do that chair thing again. But meanwhile, I'm calling it spring. Goodbye, chairs.

The first step in making sense of this image is distinguishing the two kinds of white stuff, clouds and snow. There's a big area of clouds over the Atlantic Ocean at the right edge of the picture, especially in the lower right, and another batch of clouds near the top of the image, streaming southeastward from Lake Ontario. The two cloud regions are connected in the upper right corner by a puffy little cloud bridge over . . . Portland, Maine. But that's irrelevant to the main point.

The edge of the snow line is obvious, running almost straight westward from Long Island and New York City, and it's completely upside down and backwards. North of the snow line, bare ground and leafless brown trees are clearly visible to the sensors of a satellite hundreds of miles out in space. South of the line, the satellite registers bright white ground, buried deep in snow. 

This is not how winter is supposed to be in the eastern United States, but in 2010, this is the pattern that held steady through most of January and February. It is just now breaking up, though there's still something of an upside-down snow line in northern New England.

What went wrong? Part of the blame lies with Greenland. Normally, a dome of dry, cold, heavy air sits over Greenland all winter long, known as the Greenland High. Storms in the Atlantic can't punch through this high pressure, so they steer around it, generally tracking up the coast alongside New England and into the Canadian Maritime provinces. This year, the Greenland High was diffuse and deformed and further south than usual, with a well-developed ridge near the North American mainland, far from its usual core. Storms crawling up the mid-Atlantic coast slammed into the high-pressure ridge and couldn't go any further; they wore themselves out dumping snow on Virginia and Maryland and New Jersey and Pennsylvania.

To compound the trouble, this was an El Nino year, meaning there were lots of storms with lots of moisture. 

Does this have anything to do with global warming? Of course it does, but it will be years or maybe decades before the details of the relationship become clear. When a winter is snowier than average, or less snowy than average, or a high pressure feature is shifted out of its typical position--that's weather, not necessarily climate. There's always weather, blips and static that obscure the deeper patterns arising from long-term trends in climate. Only over time can the climatic signal be recognized amidst the weather-related noise.

Meanwhile, the snow in this picture highlights a completely unrelated geological phenomenon. Notice the snowy folds of the Appalachian Mountains, ridge upon ridge, all trending northeast-southwest. The Appalachians are hundreds of millions of years old, dating back to the tectonic processes that created Pangaea and then ripped it apart. If you click on the picture to get a larger version, you should be able to see three black snakey lines, rivers that cut right across all the mountains--the Potomac, the Susquehanna, and the Delaware. Does that make sense? Wouldn't it be more logical for big rivers to follow the valleys instead of ignoring the valleys and flowing across the mountains?

This unusual river behavior has been talked about for centuries; Thomas Jefferson wrote that the place where the Potomac cuts through mountains near Harpers Ferry, West Virginia, was worth crossing the ocean to see. The place where the Delaware River splits a mountain range--the Delaware Water Gap--has been declared a national park. 

How does it happen? It's a complicated story. The Appalachians are basically several mountain chains jammed together side by side. The westernmost chain is among the oldest, now quite eroded, but it was once high and steep, like the Alps. Big rivers formed to drain the high country. Later, as tectonic rifting opened the Atlantic basin, new mountains gradually emerged east of the original range. The big, powerful rivers draining the old mountains were strong enough to cut through the rising land, and so they held onto their river beds even as the mountains rose around them.

According to the photographer, Michael Dauzvardis, this little weed in Channohon, Illinois, near Chicago, was hit hard by gusty winds blowing from all directions on January 19, 2010. The weed was bent almost double and scraped round and round, leaving perfect circular tracks in the snow.

The capital city of Iran sprawls up against the Alborz Mountains, which separate the Iranian plateau from the Caspian basin. Tehran has grown so huge--population 13 million--that smog usually hides the city from the mountains and vice versa. But every now and then, a snowstorm comes along and cleans the air.

School's out this week for February break, but there's basically no snow hereabouts for the kids to play in. For Joshua, Emily, and Andrew, a trip to the artificial snow at Seacoast Park in Windham, Maine, solved the problem neatly. The kids went tubing all day Monday, and came home to . . . a forecast for plenty of snow on Tuesday. Winter's coming back to northern New England; the rest of the country can relax now. 

 It's been a while since a puppy picture, so: this dog was caught on camera somewhere in one of those mid-Atlantic states.

The Washington Post today pointed out that now that the city had broken the old season-total snowfall record, this winter's snowfall was approaching the average for . . . Anchorage, Alaska, and Portland, Maine. I don't know about Anchorage, but in Portland our snowfall this year is way below average. And even when it's average, we don't get the whole winter's worth all in a couple of blizzards; I'm sure that would slow things down even up here.

Those of you outside the usual snowbelt have been asked, I'm sure, to find the fire hydrants in your neighborhood and dig them out. The fire fighters need the help, and I'm sure the dogs will be grateful also.

Early-morning footsteps through this grass in the hills above Calgary, Alberta, would make a little noise.