My Weather Today

[dai bread]

Tropical. 24.6°C today; humidity 82%. Yesterday the temperature went to 30°C. Those are official readings for Hamilton, about 20 minutes drive away. I haven't felt so drained since I was on Niue, which is a tropical island at 19° S latitude. There was quite a bit of rain yesterday, though if you want real rain you have to go to Queensland, Australia, at present.

[analog]

-21 Celsius this morning that -6 Fahrenheit for you non-metric types. Warmed up some to -6C.

i learned to convert in my head without having to divide by 1.8, because that division tends to give repeating decimals and i short circuit.
Only trick is close attention to the signs...

1. Double the C reading.
minus 21 X 2 = minus 42

2. Subtract 10%
minus 42 - (minus 4.2) = minus 37.8

3. Add 32
minus 37.8 +32 = minus 5.8 (which to one digit is minus 6)

try it at -40 where C and F cross....

but i haven't figured out how to go the other way from F to C......

a.

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

Sat outside in the sunshine today: I now have a sunburn. In January. It was in the high 70s in the yard. Snow belongs on mountaintops.

[piqaboo]

Me too.

[dai bread]

180 degree windshift blew away the humidity and dropped the temperature. A 90 degee swing back is raising both, and more northerlies are predicted, bring very wet air down from the tropics. Yes, we do expect 100% humidity.

[Schmeelkie]

25F here today. Barely reached 18 on Monday (it was -4 when I got up), then up to 41 yesterday (snow/freezing rain, and some rain later) and temps expected to drop to 20 during the day today. Feel like I'm on a roller coaster! It'll stay down for a while now - high on Saturday expected to be 9! Sounds like a 'go to a museum' weekend and not so much 'play in the snow' weekend to me!

Dai - would I be right in assuming that your weather is often changable? I'd guess Austraila is close enough to mess with weather patterns - a storm might veer around them and crash into you? I talk a lot about our lake effect - it can protect us from really cold air coming down from Canada, but does increase our snowfall. Just wondering if Austraila is close enough to deflect storms...

[Trumpetmaster]

Finally,,,, it is 60 degrees here and SUNNY.

I heard my home town will be getting hit with another snowstorm this Friday....

Ugh....

[Selma in Sandy Eggo]

... Just wondering if Austraila is close enough to deflect storms...

I'm gonna guess, probably not. Australia to New Zealand ≈ New York to Kansas.

[dai bread]

Dai - would I be right in assuming that your weather is often changable? I'd guess Austraila is close enough to mess with weather patterns - a storm might veer around them and crash into you? I talk a lot about our lake effect - it can protect us from really cold air coming down from Canada, but does increase our snowfall. Just wondering if Austraila is close enough to deflect storms...

Australia can influence our weather, but it takes something pretty major to do it. Bush fires are the most common example. The smoke from a big East Australian bush fire can cloud our sky, dropping the temperature a bit. Sometimes ash falls on us too. The Tasman Sea generally stops anything else. Wild-life is more of a problem. Several species of small animal, like spiders and birds, have been blown across the Tasman. The spiders in particular are not always friendly, though we haven't got the really poisonous ones. They tend to be either big or under-ground dwellers.

You're right about our changeable weather, Schmeelkie. Climate change is nothing new here. Neither are wrong weather forecasts. We're supposed to have had rain all week. We got one day.

[Schmeelkie]

Thanks Dai - I sometimes think that if studying people weren't quite so interesting, I might have ended up a meterologist. Either that or I'm just addicted to the weather channel... Lots of similarities between the two fields - you can come to generalities in prediction, but you get surprised all the time! People's behavior and weather patterns are ever-changing and complex, and if you don't look at as many possible types of data as possible your hypotheses/forecasts are more likely to be inaccurate - you need to look at the 'big picture' to get anywhere towards understanding...

Anyway, I'm glad I enjoyed the 'balmy' 23F and no wind yesterday, as, while it will make it to 21F today, the wind is picking up. tomorrow might make it to 15, and highs for Sunday and Monday are in the single digits. Icebox here we come! Not complaining - it's not really January unless we get at least a few days of deep freeze. And it's mostly on the weekend, so we can snuggle up inside, do some baking, watch a movie with popcorn and hot cocoa!

[dai bread]

Do you have ice sculpture contests, Schmeelkie? It looks as though you could, with several days below freezing.

[analog]

People's behavior and weather patterns are ever-changing and complex, and if you don't look at as many possible types of data as possible your hypotheses/forecasts are more likely to be inaccurate - you need to look at the 'big picture' to get anywhere towards understanding...

amen to big picture, or "view from a height" as Asimov called it.
Dad was an aviation forecaster and i remember his excitement when the first weather satellite started working.
He would bring home those primitive fax-like pictures and we kids took them to school for show & tell.

The satellite pictures on Weather Channel "Local on the 8's" are all a fellow needs, really.

check this site: http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/NEXSAT.html

But i do miss those big old hand drawn weather maps........

a.

[dai bread]

Wet and, for the time of the year, cold.

[BigJon]

Getting close to zero Fahrenheit here. Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr.

[DavidS]

Cloudless skies here, daytime temperatures in 60s & 70s F.
Water shortage, crops damaged. May have to limit showers to three a day.

[dai bread]

Weather clearing. Apparently the last two days have been the rain we should have got last week. Some remnants of tropical storms arrived, blew a bit of debris off trees, blew a tide surge over several of Auckland's lower places, and went away.

The Global Warming fans are saying "Told you so." People like me say "We had it much worse in 1968."

[Trumpetmaster]

mid forties here in Augusta today!

2 degrees tonight with wind chill of -15 degrees.... back home.

starting my drive back to NY tomorrow morning. will arrive Tuesday afternoon.... just in time for the big snow storm
they are predicting for this Tuesday night into Wednesday morning.....

oh well.... it is winter...............

[Marye]

-20 C (windchill -27) here in Toronto with lake effect snow throughout the day.

Seasonal starts tomorrow for a few days... warmer weather. ZERO

[Schmeelkie]

People's behavior and weather patterns are ever-changing and complex, and if you don't look at as many possible types of data as possible your hypotheses/forecasts are more likely to be inaccurate - you need to look at the 'big picture' to get anywhere towards understanding...

amen to big picture, or "view from a height" as Asimov called it.
Dad was an aviation forecaster and i remember his excitement when the first weather satellite started working.
He would bring home those primitive fax-like pictures and we kids took them to school for show & tell.

The satellite pictures on Weather Channel "Local on the 8's" are all a fellow needs, really.

check this site: http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/NEXSAT.html

But i do miss those big old hand drawn weather maps........

a.

will check the site when I have more time...
thought it was funny the other day - weather channel predicting lake effect for us in Roch, but winds out of WSW - would need to be 40+mph for us to get lake effect from that direction - lake Erie's too far. As I predicted, no snow. By Sunday, when wind had shifted to WNW - we did get an inch or so. Nowhere near the 4-6 they were predicting for the weekend. Buffalo probably got that, but not Rochester. So, geography + those lovely satellite pics analog cited = good sense of what's coming.

Waiting to see if the predicted storm coming up the east coast comes close enough to get us...
-6F when I got up this am - it's up to 7 now (noonish), predicted high of 35 tomorrow - it'll feel balmy!
This am temp led to city schools and a suburban district with lots of walkers to close. I didn't even think to look for closings and Pumpkin's bus showed up on schedule... doubt they'll go outside for recess though.

[Schmeelkie]

Also - yes Dai - we have at least 4-5 winter festivals, and you'll usually see ice sculptures/contests at them. In early Feb, the city runs a festival at a park on the beach - they have ice sculptures, a Chili-making contest, music, other family activities, and a 'polar plunge' for charity - basically you raise money on the expectation that you're going to run into Lake Ontario (which is often warmer than the air, but hardly out of the 30's) for a minute or two, get wet and get back out. Crazy, but for a good cause. They usually have 100-200 people doing it!