Fall Banter, Observation and General Discussion 2018

[powderfreak]

Multiple power poles down on RT 100 and RT 108 in Stowe.  Dammit.  That'll take a while.  F*ck these autumn wind events.

[mreaves]

52 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Entire town of Stowe just lost power too in high winds.  Lovely.

Are there 500,000 with the power out? That was DIT’s prediction. 

[#NoPoles]

52 minutes ago, powderfreak said:

Multiple power poles down on RT 100 and RT 108 in Stowe.  Dammit.  That'll take a while.  F*ck these autumn wind events.

Damn, thats a few days worth of work...didnt you guys, just in the recent past, go multiple days without power?

[Tom12309]

My niece lives in Underhill, her husband has a giant sugaring outfit.  The last huge blow down took him the better part of the winter to clean up and get the pipelines repaired.  Time to do it all again it sounds like.

[CoastalWx]

A nice damaging day here. Was fun checking out local neighborhood damage. Glad we live here.

[powderfreak]

1 hour ago, mreaves said:

Are there 500,000 with the power out? That was DIT’s prediction. 

Ha not quite.  Outage map showing 1500 houses without power in Stowe, which is most of them lol.

[HoarfrostHubb]

9 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

A nice damaging day here. Was fun checking out local neighborhood damage. Glad we live here.

CT Blizz has learned how to hack AmWx

[OceanStWx]

9 hours ago, CoastalWx said:

A nice damaging day here. Was fun checking out local neighborhood damage. Glad we live here.

HWWs are tough to verify, period. I think we struggled up here because once the dry slot came through we still had low level junk to clear out. Not enough time to steepen the low levels lapse rates while the winds were favorable aloft. 

The reality is we only had two CWOPs hit 58 mph exactly, and only 3 ASOS/AWOS that even did better than advisory (LEB, AUG, RKD). Lots of 40-45 mph though.

[CoastalWx]

10 minutes ago, OceanStWx said:

HWWs are tough to verify, period. I think we struggled up here because once the dry slot came through we still had low level junk to clear out. Not enough time to steepen the low levels lapse rates while the winds were favorable aloft. 

The reality is we only had two CWOPs hit 58 mph exactly, and only 3 ASOS/AWOS that even did better than advisory (LEB, AUG, RKD). Lots of 40-45 mph though.

It seemed like there was a decent belt of winds from near BOS and just south. Not sure if it was the leftover warmth aiding in instability or what. Luckily  lots of leaves were already falling off otherwise could have been some more damage. Lots of 50-60 reports. I went for a walk with my kids and we definitely stayed away from the trees. Just had that sound. And of course stumbling across some damage is good. It definitely was better than I thought locally.

[Whineminster]

Pretty weak showing here overall. I did see lots of power trucks headed north on Route 13 in Townsend though last night, must have been some damage then. 

[powderfreak]

Powers back at home I hear so that's nice.

[wxeyeNH]

Snowy morning up on the mountain.....  Big Island Hawaii

[wxeyeNH]

Happiness is its 1115am and I'm thinking only 45 minutes for the 12Z GFS.  Then realizing its already in.

[OceanStWx]

15 minutes ago, wxeyeNH said:

Happiness is its 1115am and I'm thinking only 45 minutes for the 12Z GFS.  Then realizing its already in.

And then realizing it's the GFS and you have to wait for the Euro anyway? 

[weathafella]

1 hour ago, wxeyeNH said:

Happiness is its 1115am and I'm thinking only 45 minutes for the 12Z GFS.  Then realizing its already in.

11:15 you should be out to d8 or so....reasonable to go to bed.

[weathafella]

I’m gonna be in TX this week leaving tomorrow-blue norther later in the week?  

[powderfreak]

5 hours ago, OceanStWx said:

HWWs are tough to verify, period. I think we struggled up here because once the dry slot came through we still had low level junk to clear out. Not enough time to steepen the low levels lapse rates while the winds were favorable aloft. 

The reality is we only had two CWOPs hit 58 mph exactly, and only 3 ASOS/AWOS that even did better than advisory (LEB, AUG, RKD). Lots of 40-45 mph though.

So hard to verify those things but like locally in Stowe, I couldn't care less what the actual wind speeds were.  It's all about disruptions to life at that point.  

Maybe you can't verify it via speeds but when you see road closures and trees, poles down that's enough in the public's eye to be like "hey they were right, it was f'in windy."

Now if you don't issue because you won't verify and then the power company linemen are out all night fixing stuff, the public will be wondering what the hell happened and why there was no warning for wind.   

Some photos Stowe Electric posted from last night:

[OceanStWx]

Just now, powderfreak said:

So hard to verify those things but like locally in Stowe, I couldn't care less what the actual wind speeds were.  It's all about disruptions to life at that point.  

Maybe you can't verify it via speeds but when you see road closures and trees, poles down that's enough in the public's eye to be like "hey they were right, it was f'in windy."

Now if you don't issue because you won't verify and then the power company linemen are out all night fixing stuff, the public will be wondering what the hell happened and why there was no warning for wind.   

Some photos Stowe Electric posted from last night:

There is certainly the option to do things based on impacts. Though its a bit murky with advisory vs. warning because 45+ will topple trees around here, so which do you issue? 

Across the GYX CWA though yesterday was pretty tame for a wind event. More advisory level outages than HWW. 

[wxmanmitch]

Took this recently died balsam down (plus a couple of smaller ones not pictured) since it was a dry day for a change. It was a bit cold to start when I went out at 10 AM, but it recovered nicely into the low 40s with little to no wind.

Unlike the other trees, this one died this year and was likely a result of the excavator burying the roots under 3 feet of fill, which cut off the supply of water and nutrients. This will kill any type of tree.

Felling this tree was a little tricky since it had a slight back lean toward my propane tank, so I had to hammer in some wedges into the back cut to make sure it didn't fall backwards. Then again, I pretty much always use them on anything >= ~4" in diameter. Got it to go right where I wanted it to and I'm glad it's down because dead evergreens look like toilet brushes.

[powderfreak]

KMVY... 31F. 

That's pretty awesome considering the north-south gradient of temperatures tonight.  The little island that could.

 

[CapturedNature]

9 hours ago, powderfreak said:

KMVY... 31F. 

That's pretty awesome considering the north-south gradient of temperatures tonight.  The little island that could.

 

They must have remained cloud free.  I was 32° around 10PM last night and temps went up when the clouds rolled in.

Beautiful sunrise this morning!

[Damage In Tolland]

10 hours ago, powderfreak said:

KMVY... 31F. 

That's pretty awesome considering the north-south gradient of temperatures tonight.  The little island that could.

 

Fake cold 

[tamarack]

Temp had dropped to mid-upper 20s by 8 last evening, then barely moved overnight, thanks mainly to clouds.  Still cold enough to put 5/16" ice on the soon-to-be-dumped washtub.

Mitch's fir has nearly 60 rings, about all one can expect from that species until one is in northern Maine.  The fill probably shortened its life by 10 years or less, given the rot pockets.

[CapturedNature]

12 minutes ago, tamarack said:

Temp had dropped to mid-upper 20s by 8 last evening, then barely moved overnight, thanks mainly to clouds.  Still cold enough to put 5/16" ice on the soon-to-be-dumped washtub.

Mitch's fir has nearly 60 rings, about all one can expect from that species until one is in northern Maine.  The fill probably shortened its life by 10 years or less, given the rot pockets.

That's interesting.  It's fascinating how different species can live different lengths.  We had our woods logged back in 1996 and I was interested in this one section of white pines that were a decent size.  I counted the rings on the larger ones and they were about 120-130 years old.  That makes sense in that the land was a farm back in the 1800s and the farm was abandoned after the Civil War.  I left a pair of the largest trees and hoped that they would survive without their surrounding brethren but they have.  Hopefully they will be there for a while...

[J.Spin]

1 hour ago, tamarack said:

Mitch's fir has nearly 60 rings, about all one can expect from that species until one is in northern Maine.

Wow, that’s really interesting, it sounds like they grow better in northern Maine?  What’s the basis for the better growth up there?

[Lava Rock]

High of 37.5f. chilly day

Sent from my Pixel 2 using Tapatalk

[weatherwiz]

Does anyone remember the date of the (I think it was a PDS) tornado watch in May of 2003 that turned into a bust? 

[tamarack]

2 hours ago, J.Spin said:

Wow, that’s really interesting, it sounds like they grow better in northern Maine?  What’s the basis for the better growth up there?

Balsam fir is a boreal species, though its current northerly limit is well south of black spruce.  Fir is near the southerly edge of its range in central New England, found mainly at elevation there, but in the northerly portions of Maine and extreme northern VT/NH it grows at all elevations up to tree line.  Any species near the edges of its range will be more vulnerable to insects, diseases, drought stress (south and west edges), frost damage, and general cold that prevents growth of viable seeds (northerly edges.)  I've seen fir along I-84 in the higher ground some 20-30 miles NE form Scranton, PA, but those few are outliers.  By the time one gets south of Exit 2 of the Maine Turnpike, fir has dropped out of the picture, at least as seen from the highway.

Fir on my lot does much better than that on the midcoast tracts managed by our agency, where it tends to die out by age 50, but nowhere near as well as in NW Maine - growth rates aren't all that much different (always subject to site fertility and competing species) but average lifespans are quite different.

In reading discussions about climate change and forest composition, I think that some forest predictions ("by the year 2100, Maine will look like today's North Carolina") are off base because trees are generally pretty tough, but that the real changes in vegetation will be caused by insects and diseases invading from southerly climes, rather than directly from warmer temps, or even drought.  (Though both could increase stress and make trees more vulnerable to those invading attackers.)

[wxmanmitch]

5 hours ago, tamarack said:

Temp had dropped to mid-upper 20s by 8 last evening, then barely moved overnight, thanks mainly to clouds.  Still cold enough to put 5/16" ice on the soon-to-be-dumped washtub.

Mitch's fir has nearly 60 rings, about all one can expect from that species until one is in northern Maine.  The fill probably shortened its life by 10 years or less, given the rot pockets.

Interesting...I never bothered to count the rings, but noted that they were pretty wide compared to other species I've cut, indicating that fir is a fast growing species. The upper part of the tree where the newer growth was had the widest rings.

I have some larger firs on the property, one of which died a couple years ago by the road. It is a bit more than the diameter of my 16" chainsaw and leans toward the power lines, so I don't feel comfortable tackling it on my own. I will need to hire a tree service for that one or else ma nature could bring it down onto the wires.

[moneypitmike]

This bald eagle swooped past my window this morning.