A cold start for March
02/03/14 05:18
Our local paper had a headline yesterday that read, “March roaring in like a polar bear in the Black Hills.” I hadn’t heard that saying before. I know the saying, “In like a lion, out like a lamb.” I wondered what the parallel ending for the Polar Bear analogy might be. “In like a polar bear, out like a penguin?” I know, I know, polar bears live near the North pole, penguins live near the south pole and never the twain shall meet.
We certainly had winter weather for the first day of March. I was at the church and doing a few errands and the thermometer was overing in the -5 range at mid day. We got a few of inches of light, powdery snow and it fell in such a manner that the cleared driveway I shoveled at noon was under the snow by 4 pm. We decided not to make a firewood run to the Cheyenne River reservation yesterday. It’s too risky to have trucks and trailers on the road when the blowing snow reduces visibility so much. We’ll try tomorrow.
Of course, this isn’t Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the Groundhog Club believes that spring can begin in February some years and in a bad year it begins in mid March. This is the Black Hills where we know a spring blizzard can dump a lot of snow in Late April or early May. That doesn’t mean that we don’t ever get spring-like weather in March. We can have pleasant, above-freezing weather in any month of the year. We had some nice 50-degree days in February, though some folks will be quick to forget those days while they are shoveling snow this week.
Here in the hills, I think that if it were announced on February 2 that there would be only six more weeks of winter, we’d all raise a cheer. Not bad to have winter over by the middle of March!
Alas, most of there sayings about the weather are just that: sayings. The ancients believed that gods or spirits ruled the weather and that bad weather was a kind of punishment. They also believed that the good and the bad achieved some kind of balance. So if the beginning of the month brought bad weather, the end would bring good. They also believed that if the beginning was good, the end would be bad. “In like a lamb, out like a lion” was as common as the opposite.
About the only truth to the old sayings is that the weather in March can be pretty varied. We can see spring rains and blizzards in the same week. We can have wonderful kite-flying days alongside snow shoveling days. There have been years when the ice is out of the lake in March and others when it remains frozen for the entire month.
There are some other sayings about March that you’d probably find in the Farmer’s Almanac: “A dry March and a wet May? Fill barns and bays with corn and hay.” Of course corn doesn’t grow all that well around here, so I’m not counting on any full barns. A few ears of good sweet corn at the end of August is sufficient for me. And a wet May with the weather drying out at the end of June might produce a good first cutting of hay in July.
“As it rains in March so it rains in June” doesn’t seem to work out all that well around here, either. At least I hope it isn’t “as it snows in March so it snows in June.” I don’t think the amount of precipitation in March says anything about how much precipitation we will get in June. In general late springs bring shorter fire seasons around here, and that is a good thing. With all of the trees killed by bark beetles in the hills, we’ll take all the moisture we can get and we’ll still be sniffing the air for smoke by the end of July.
I think the saying, “March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers” might be true. We usually have a few flowers around here by May.
Generally the sayings we have in the back of our heads have some kind of basis in observed reality, but they rarely work for prediction of anything.
But I don’t get the reference to polar bears in yesterday’s newspaper. If they think that it is polar bear cold around here, they’ve never been to the arctic. Of course I haven’t either, but I have not trouble putting on my insulated coveralls and working outside at -5. I know that I wouldn’t be doing that at -40. There is a big difference.
We always used -40 as the standard for super cold weather when I was a kid. I’m not sure it ever got down that cold, but I do remember -30 days. The magic about -40 is that the thermometers we had in those days didn’t go any colder. Since mercury freezes at -38 Fahrenheit, a mercury thermometer won’t work at any temperatures that are colder. Also for you trivia buffs, -40 Fahrenheit is also -40 Celsius. The two scales cross at that point.
Polar Bears can withstand -40 temperatures with 40mph winds outdoors. They don’t hibernate. And they can swim in open water at any temperature. But we don’t have any polar bears in our neck of the woods.
I think that the reference to polar bears might have been a veiled reference to global warming. Polar bears have become a kind of a symbol of climate change. The melting of arctic ice has meant some big changes in the habitat and behavior of polar bears.
There remain, however, a few folks who don’t believe the evidence of global warming and who cite the cold winter as evidence that global warming isn’t occurring. The observation carries about as much wisdom as the old weather sayings that we quote. It might be an interesting observation, but it isn’t a good predictor of the future.
So I’m not making any predictions about the overall weather patterns of the month. It’s still below zero outside this morning. I won’t be worrying about polar bears when I go out for the paper, however.
We certainly had winter weather for the first day of March. I was at the church and doing a few errands and the thermometer was overing in the -5 range at mid day. We got a few of inches of light, powdery snow and it fell in such a manner that the cleared driveway I shoveled at noon was under the snow by 4 pm. We decided not to make a firewood run to the Cheyenne River reservation yesterday. It’s too risky to have trucks and trailers on the road when the blowing snow reduces visibility so much. We’ll try tomorrow.
Of course, this isn’t Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, where the Groundhog Club believes that spring can begin in February some years and in a bad year it begins in mid March. This is the Black Hills where we know a spring blizzard can dump a lot of snow in Late April or early May. That doesn’t mean that we don’t ever get spring-like weather in March. We can have pleasant, above-freezing weather in any month of the year. We had some nice 50-degree days in February, though some folks will be quick to forget those days while they are shoveling snow this week.
Here in the hills, I think that if it were announced on February 2 that there would be only six more weeks of winter, we’d all raise a cheer. Not bad to have winter over by the middle of March!
Alas, most of there sayings about the weather are just that: sayings. The ancients believed that gods or spirits ruled the weather and that bad weather was a kind of punishment. They also believed that the good and the bad achieved some kind of balance. So if the beginning of the month brought bad weather, the end would bring good. They also believed that if the beginning was good, the end would be bad. “In like a lamb, out like a lion” was as common as the opposite.
About the only truth to the old sayings is that the weather in March can be pretty varied. We can see spring rains and blizzards in the same week. We can have wonderful kite-flying days alongside snow shoveling days. There have been years when the ice is out of the lake in March and others when it remains frozen for the entire month.
There are some other sayings about March that you’d probably find in the Farmer’s Almanac: “A dry March and a wet May? Fill barns and bays with corn and hay.” Of course corn doesn’t grow all that well around here, so I’m not counting on any full barns. A few ears of good sweet corn at the end of August is sufficient for me. And a wet May with the weather drying out at the end of June might produce a good first cutting of hay in July.
“As it rains in March so it rains in June” doesn’t seem to work out all that well around here, either. At least I hope it isn’t “as it snows in March so it snows in June.” I don’t think the amount of precipitation in March says anything about how much precipitation we will get in June. In general late springs bring shorter fire seasons around here, and that is a good thing. With all of the trees killed by bark beetles in the hills, we’ll take all the moisture we can get and we’ll still be sniffing the air for smoke by the end of July.
I think the saying, “March winds and April showers bring forth May flowers” might be true. We usually have a few flowers around here by May.
Generally the sayings we have in the back of our heads have some kind of basis in observed reality, but they rarely work for prediction of anything.
But I don’t get the reference to polar bears in yesterday’s newspaper. If they think that it is polar bear cold around here, they’ve never been to the arctic. Of course I haven’t either, but I have not trouble putting on my insulated coveralls and working outside at -5. I know that I wouldn’t be doing that at -40. There is a big difference.
We always used -40 as the standard for super cold weather when I was a kid. I’m not sure it ever got down that cold, but I do remember -30 days. The magic about -40 is that the thermometers we had in those days didn’t go any colder. Since mercury freezes at -38 Fahrenheit, a mercury thermometer won’t work at any temperatures that are colder. Also for you trivia buffs, -40 Fahrenheit is also -40 Celsius. The two scales cross at that point.
Polar Bears can withstand -40 temperatures with 40mph winds outdoors. They don’t hibernate. And they can swim in open water at any temperature. But we don’t have any polar bears in our neck of the woods.
I think that the reference to polar bears might have been a veiled reference to global warming. Polar bears have become a kind of a symbol of climate change. The melting of arctic ice has meant some big changes in the habitat and behavior of polar bears.
There remain, however, a few folks who don’t believe the evidence of global warming and who cite the cold winter as evidence that global warming isn’t occurring. The observation carries about as much wisdom as the old weather sayings that we quote. It might be an interesting observation, but it isn’t a good predictor of the future.
So I’m not making any predictions about the overall weather patterns of the month. It’s still below zero outside this morning. I won’t be worrying about polar bears when I go out for the paper, however.