Pellice

Fun article in the NY Times today about meteorologists' largely unsuccessful attempts to beat back weather hyperbole: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/01/18/science/weather-forecasts-language.html 1st 10 articles per month are free, so should not be behind a paywall, yet.

Hearing people on TV trying to argue that Ian "should have" been a Category 5, and maybe they would then more would have heeded warnings. But I think it's important to reinforce the idea that hurricanes don't have to be "Cat 5" to be lethal, that lower designations are also dangerous. Ian will be an important example to be cited in the future.

If this is the "great weather" westerners claim for themselves, then they can keep it. I'd NEVER move to the southwest and experience this weather or worse, day after day. And yes, I know it's drier (although this has been pretty dry the last couple of days), but that just means fewer, if any, clouds, and no prospects of rain. If I didn't have rain every few days, and interesting clouds, and changeable weather, I'd sorely miss it. Who would want to retire to a place with weather like this? Ugh! [heat-driven rant over].

Well, the fate of this year's spring birding season is just about sealed. Tomorrow is the statewide World Series of Birding, and it's looking to be just as flat as the rest of this spring's migration has been. We needed several warm fronts with southerly, preferably southwesterly light overnight winds, and we didn't get them. One night of southerly winds, night of May 2, and it was followed by good numbers of arriving birds - but May 3 was rainy and very overcast, and the birds were not inclined to sing, and the lack of sun made most of them horribly backlit. You can actually see migration routes shifting inland. The Cornell Lab of Ornithology's new "migration dashboard" - https://birdcast.info/ - is somehow able to use radar to give good estimates of overhead migration at night, and I could see birds dividing around New Castle County in Delaware and heading inland following the spine of the eastern Appalachian ridge rather than the coast. This has been the most recent of a number of consecutive years of poor spring migration in New Jersey, all due to rather relentless easterly and northeasterly winds, occasionally strong. There's fear the spring weather patterns are shifting for good.

While awaiting this coming storm, a really good tick-tock about how a lot of humans can cause a snowstorm to snowball into a crisis. https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2022/01/27/i95-traffic-backup-winter-storm/ This was the epic emergency in Virginia and Washington in early January. Not our forum, but ... it couldn't happen here, right?

And Britain is getting the East Coast's winter - the tabloid Daily Mail's UK front page (not the US, the UK) is half full of stories on "Storm Ciara" which is blasting, with 90+ and 8+ mph winds, a story on surfers riding wages up a river, disruptions at airports. Here's one: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-7988499/Britain-faces-fresh-SNOW-ice-warning-tonight-tomorrow.html They are already anticipating that this storm hitting now will be battering them this weekend.

Thanks so much, I was really curious.

I am wondering why some low level ground fog has developed following the cessation of the rain. I checked the temperature, and there hasn't been any surge of much warmer air, nor did the sun come out (as happens in summer sometimes). I would have thought that the fog would form only if warmer temperatures were moving over colder ground. The ground is still frozen a little further down, but the precip that fell today was all liquid. The temperature has barely varied a degree all day. Just curious about the fog.

Yet another flash flood watch posted for much of NJ, with some amounts of 5" possible!! Have the criteria changed this summer, or are we really seeing this many instances of flooding?