Cold
06/01/14 03:41
I suspect that it is little consolation for some folks, but so far it simply hasn’t gotten as cold around here as has been forecast. This morning it is about 11 below zero here at our house. But there is no wind. It probably felt colder yesterday when temperatures hovered around zero and the wind was blowing.
A quick scan of the weather map shows that it is cold across much of the US. The polar air that has been trapped in Northern Canada for weeks has now moved south and pretty much covers the US except for the extreme southeast. I suppose that people in San Diego think it is cold with overnight lows hovering in the mid 50’s, but I’m not sure that folks in Duluth, Minnesota are that worried at 29 below. Much of North Dakota is reporting temperatures in the -20 range.
This blast is expected to be relatively short-lived. Because the dense air is so widely disbursed it will move rather quickly off to the east and the air will warm as it crosses the Atlantic. The forecast for Rapid City looks for highs in the teens today, thirties tomorrow and forties by the end of the week.
I’ve lived my entire life in cold weather country. Montana, Chicago, North Dakota, Idaho and South Dakota are all places where the weather can turn severe and cold temperatures are not unknown. I an my three younger brothers all had paper routes and so we learned how to get up, get dressed and prepare for the weather. The paper we delivered, the Billings Gazette, recommended that paper routes be about 60 customers each. I quickly found out that I could handle two routes and our enterprise grew to about 150 customers. Sometimes I delivered all of those papers alone. Sometimes I had one or more brothers to help. We had “rules” about the weather.
Anything above 50 degrees meant that you could leave your jacket at home unless it was raining. Keep moving and you won’t get cold. From 50 to 20 a light jacket will do. If you keep moving and working, you probably don’t need gloves, but it is good to have a pair of cotton gloves in your pocket or paper bag for riding your bike, especially if the wind is blowing. At 20 degrees it is about time to switch to your winter coat and you’ll need gloves all the time. By 10 degrees you should be wearing long underwear and you might want to consider switching from gloves to mittens. You can’t use your pliers with mittens and even folding the papers is a pain, but once you’ve got them folded, you can learn to get them to the doorstep with mittens. At zero degrees we wore our overshoes even if there was no snow for the extra layer of insulation. We wore double layered mittens with wool liners and leather outers. A wool scarf was a good addition, as it could be pulled up over the face as needed without icing up your glasses. When the temperature made it down to -20 you added another layer of caution. Things started to break. We generally didn’t ride our bikes at -20 or colder because they didn’t seem to save us that much time with chains tightening on sprockets and bearings being stiff. Most of the time if it was colder than -20 our father could be talked into helping us with the car, at least to shuttle the bundles of papers and reach the farthest customers. We’d take two blocks worth of papers and then switch off in the car with another brother who would take the next two blocks.
We didn’t get that much weather that was -30 and when we did it rarely lasted for more than a few days. You can feel the difference between -20 and -30. At -30 you need to wear a full face mask and make sure that you don’t have any exposed skin. Borrowing a pair of overshoes that are too big for you and stuffing them with newspapers helps with the cold feet at -30. As I became a teen Mickey boots became available from military surplus stores. I don’t know how cold those will go, but I’ve never had cold feet when wearing the big white boots. But they are heavy and they slow you down.
So from my experience here is something that I know. It is weird to drive on wet pavement when the temperatures hover near zero. But that is what it is like in Rapid City. The main defense against ice in this town is chemicals. The intersections are so heavily salted that they remain wet. Had they not put all of that salt on the road, it would plow easily in the cold temperatures. I was able to shovel even snow compacted by the cars in my driveway yesterday because the cold snow doesn’t stick as much as when the snow is warmer. And drivers who have become accustomed to the city keeping the ice off of the streets need to be wary. Another ten degrees that wet pavement turns into a greasy slush that lengthens stopping times and makes it difficult to steer.
Here’s how you’d expect the roads to look when it is zero degrees.
Here’s how the streets looked in Rapid City at -4 yesterday.
At -20 even unplowed snow gives more traction than the chemically treated goo that ends up in the intersections around town. Actually it isn’t that hard to drive on snow. There’s quite a bit of traction if it isn’t too deep. Compacted snow is a reasonable surface for speeds below 40 or so. And you can drive at near normal speeds on ribbon ice as long as you have good visibility and there are strips of dry pavement. For the most part, sand is an effective treatment for ice on roads.
But our city engineers prefer a slurry of potassium chloride that can be sprayed from the back of the trucks. There are plenty of arguments about costs and benefits, but no one seems to be taking in the costs of damage to vehicles, pavement and surrounding vegetation when estimating the cost of treating the roads.
We’re not going to see -20 from this weather system, however. We’ll leave that for our northern brothers and sisters.
Still, I’m glad I don’t have to deliver papers this morning.
A quick scan of the weather map shows that it is cold across much of the US. The polar air that has been trapped in Northern Canada for weeks has now moved south and pretty much covers the US except for the extreme southeast. I suppose that people in San Diego think it is cold with overnight lows hovering in the mid 50’s, but I’m not sure that folks in Duluth, Minnesota are that worried at 29 below. Much of North Dakota is reporting temperatures in the -20 range.
This blast is expected to be relatively short-lived. Because the dense air is so widely disbursed it will move rather quickly off to the east and the air will warm as it crosses the Atlantic. The forecast for Rapid City looks for highs in the teens today, thirties tomorrow and forties by the end of the week.
I’ve lived my entire life in cold weather country. Montana, Chicago, North Dakota, Idaho and South Dakota are all places where the weather can turn severe and cold temperatures are not unknown. I an my three younger brothers all had paper routes and so we learned how to get up, get dressed and prepare for the weather. The paper we delivered, the Billings Gazette, recommended that paper routes be about 60 customers each. I quickly found out that I could handle two routes and our enterprise grew to about 150 customers. Sometimes I delivered all of those papers alone. Sometimes I had one or more brothers to help. We had “rules” about the weather.
Anything above 50 degrees meant that you could leave your jacket at home unless it was raining. Keep moving and you won’t get cold. From 50 to 20 a light jacket will do. If you keep moving and working, you probably don’t need gloves, but it is good to have a pair of cotton gloves in your pocket or paper bag for riding your bike, especially if the wind is blowing. At 20 degrees it is about time to switch to your winter coat and you’ll need gloves all the time. By 10 degrees you should be wearing long underwear and you might want to consider switching from gloves to mittens. You can’t use your pliers with mittens and even folding the papers is a pain, but once you’ve got them folded, you can learn to get them to the doorstep with mittens. At zero degrees we wore our overshoes even if there was no snow for the extra layer of insulation. We wore double layered mittens with wool liners and leather outers. A wool scarf was a good addition, as it could be pulled up over the face as needed without icing up your glasses. When the temperature made it down to -20 you added another layer of caution. Things started to break. We generally didn’t ride our bikes at -20 or colder because they didn’t seem to save us that much time with chains tightening on sprockets and bearings being stiff. Most of the time if it was colder than -20 our father could be talked into helping us with the car, at least to shuttle the bundles of papers and reach the farthest customers. We’d take two blocks worth of papers and then switch off in the car with another brother who would take the next two blocks.
We didn’t get that much weather that was -30 and when we did it rarely lasted for more than a few days. You can feel the difference between -20 and -30. At -30 you need to wear a full face mask and make sure that you don’t have any exposed skin. Borrowing a pair of overshoes that are too big for you and stuffing them with newspapers helps with the cold feet at -30. As I became a teen Mickey boots became available from military surplus stores. I don’t know how cold those will go, but I’ve never had cold feet when wearing the big white boots. But they are heavy and they slow you down.
So from my experience here is something that I know. It is weird to drive on wet pavement when the temperatures hover near zero. But that is what it is like in Rapid City. The main defense against ice in this town is chemicals. The intersections are so heavily salted that they remain wet. Had they not put all of that salt on the road, it would plow easily in the cold temperatures. I was able to shovel even snow compacted by the cars in my driveway yesterday because the cold snow doesn’t stick as much as when the snow is warmer. And drivers who have become accustomed to the city keeping the ice off of the streets need to be wary. Another ten degrees that wet pavement turns into a greasy slush that lengthens stopping times and makes it difficult to steer.
Here’s how you’d expect the roads to look when it is zero degrees.
Here’s how the streets looked in Rapid City at -4 yesterday.
At -20 even unplowed snow gives more traction than the chemically treated goo that ends up in the intersections around town. Actually it isn’t that hard to drive on snow. There’s quite a bit of traction if it isn’t too deep. Compacted snow is a reasonable surface for speeds below 40 or so. And you can drive at near normal speeds on ribbon ice as long as you have good visibility and there are strips of dry pavement. For the most part, sand is an effective treatment for ice on roads.
But our city engineers prefer a slurry of potassium chloride that can be sprayed from the back of the trucks. There are plenty of arguments about costs and benefits, but no one seems to be taking in the costs of damage to vehicles, pavement and surrounding vegetation when estimating the cost of treating the roads.
We’re not going to see -20 from this weather system, however. We’ll leave that for our northern brothers and sisters.
Still, I’m glad I don’t have to deliver papers this morning.