Winter Discussion

[James Kerman]

Head down under instead.  Chance of snow: Slim to none.

[NSEP]

55 minutes ago, kerbiloid said:

Winter of my dream!

I swear, it is more of a nightmare than a dream to look at. 

[tater]

Dunno if we'll get anything closer to Christmas or not. We've sometimes had huge snows this time of year, but they are atypical. The pictured snow os pretty typical for what we get---then it might be gone the same day by lunch.

40 minutes ago, James Kerman said:

Head down under instead.  Chance of snow: Slim to none.

Wow.

How much annual rainfall? One thing I like about the desert (we get about 25 cm a year of rain) is that you can watch the storms coming from a huge distance (though it helps that we have mountains to increase LOS distance).

[James Kerman]

Actually 250mm annual rain is about right for the Western desert as well.  It gets close to 0degC at night and very hot during the day.

I have never seen or felt snow and I envy you people.

[LordFerret]

9 hours ago, James Kerman said:

Head down under instead.  Chance of snow: Slim to none.

Wow, I didn't know plants grew on Duna!

 

@TheSaint; Texas. Heat. Heat? The first time I went to Austin there was a cold snap, bitter cold. The trip following, it was so hot, ridiculous heat, that upon leaving the airport and stepping outside, hitting that "wall", I almost said screw it, tempted to turn around to book a flight back home.

[TheSaint]

42 minutes ago, LordFerret said:

Wow, I didn't know plants grew on Duna!

@TheSaint; Texas. Heat. Heat? The first time I went to Austin there was a cold snap, bitter cold. The trip following, it was so hot, ridiculous heat, that upon leaving the airport and stepping outside, hitting that "wall", I almost said screw it, tempted to turn around to book a flight back home.

Oh, yeah, Texas can get real cold if you go up north. I knew a lot of folks who left California for Dallas, and their first winter came around and they were all, "SNOW!!! Holy crap! This is Texas! We're not supposed to get snow!"

[razark]

2 hours ago, LordFerret said:

Texas. Heat. Heat? The first time I went to Austin there was a cold snap, bitter cold. The trip following, it was so hot, ridiculous heat, that upon leaving the airport and stepping outside, hitting that "wall", I almost said screw it, tempted to turn around to book a flight back home.

Yeah, inland Texas can get quite cold.

However, if you were in Austin, you didn't hit the "wall".  You need some real Gulf Coast humidity for the whole effect.

[LordFerret]

1 hour ago, razark said:

You need some real Gulf Coast humidity for the whole effect.

Gulf Shores, Alabama! Does that count?

Actually, the beach / shore area right here in NJ can get pretty grueling, if not downright disgusting. With temperatures in the high 90's (or over 100 even), and humidity at 100%... ugh!

[tater]

8 hours ago, James Kerman said:

Actually 250mm annual rain is about right for the Western desert as well.  It gets close to 0degC at night and very hot during the day.

I have never seen or felt snow and I envy you people.

We have a ~17C diurnal temp difference, generally. Nice temps like 20 feel pretty hot when the sun is out here (and over 300 days of the year it is)---we get snow because of the altitude. My house is a little shy of 2000m altitude.

Love that image, it's amazing how pretty such a simple image can be.

[James Kerman]

The temp during the day in summer (now) is usually about 36-45C and most of the outback looks like that.  You go from wearing shorts and thongs (flip-flops) during the day to thermal gear at night.

The highest temperature I've been in was on a mine-site at 49C a few years back and you could have cooked an egg on anything that was outside.

[Green Baron]

It's incredible for someone who hasn't seen that before how many climate- and vegetation-zones there are on a volcanic island.

Concerning temp., there might be snow up there at 2400m (well, a few cm and it won't last long) and people are swimming in the atlantic in 22°C (air and water). The caldera rim is in the line of sight from the beach.

Also, great foto, @James Kerman, messed up my whitebalance for hours ... :-)

 

[HoloYolo]

I hate winter. Feeling cold sucks, I do not enjoy living in the same temperatures the people on the Titanic went through in the water.

Christmas, however, will be awesome. I want so many cool things, I hope I get them.

Also, moving to Florida in about 3 weeks, hopefully I will never have to deal with cold ever again, already want to sell my winter coat.

The lowest temperature I have ever experienced is  -5 degrees Fahrenheit, never again. 

[cubinator]

The temperature won't get above -20 C tomorrow, and everything is covered in slippery snow and ice. Just a normal December day here.

33 minutes ago, HoloYolo said:

The lowest temperature I have ever experienced is  -5 degrees Fahrenheit, never again. 

I have to go outside in that kind of weather all the time where I live...In fact, it's only 5 degrees right now. At least there's a few months of real warm weather before it all starts over again. 

[Superfluous J]

1 hour ago, HoloYolo said:

The lowest temperature I have ever experienced is  -5 degrees Fahrenheit, never again. 

I ran about 20 yards through -20 F in boxers and a tee shirt (no shoes or socks even) on a dare. THAT is a "Never Again."

We drop below 0 F here about every other year. The coldest I remember is -15. When it's that cold, you can throw a pail of boiling water in the air and it turns into snow.

[nightingale]

It's currently -31°C (-24°F for those of you in the states).  I'd like to think that this is the coldest it's going to get, but January and February tend to be the coldest months.

The boiling water thing is untestable - it's too cold to go outside.

[tater]

Dusted us this morning. Still snowing up high, can't see the mountains.

 

 

 

[Waxing_Kibbous]

As I drove to work on unplowed roads at 6:30AM this morning I had an epiphany: if I were a Kerbal I'd have pretty high courage and stupidity ratings

[HoloYolo]

6 hours ago, cubinator said:

The temperature won't get above -20 C tomorrow, and everything is covered in slippery snow and ice. Just a normal December day here.

I have to go outside in that kind of weather all the time where I live...In fact, it's only 5 degrees right now. At least there's a few months of real warm weather before it all starts over again. 

 

5 hours ago, 5thHorseman said:

I ran about 20 yards through -20 F in boxers and a tee shirt (no shoes or socks even) on a dare. THAT is a "Never Again."

We drop below 0 F here about every other year. The coldest I remember is -15. When it's that cold, you can throw a pail of boiling water in the air and it turns into snow.

Poor you. So glad I'll never be more north than I am right now during winter. Hopefully.

[SSgt Baloo]

Sometimes the holidays can be stressful.

When I was a kid, we lived in Chico, California. Chico is located near Beale AFB. 

One Christmas Eve in Chico, we were watching the evening news when the station interrupted the regular news to inform us that NORAD had detected a UFO flying in from over the north pole at high speed. They went on to inform us that every effort was being made to contact the object by radio and that interceptors stationed at Beale AFB were being readied to pursue the UFO if it did not respond to radio signals. The evening news resumed.

My sister and I were, respectively, 5 and 8 years old. We knew that this meant that that Santa was on his way. 

A few minutes later, they interrupted the news again and informed us that the UFO was not responding to radio signals. They added that the interceptors from Beale had been launched, (here they showed stock footage of F-102 fighters taking off) and that they would intercept the UFO in less than 10 minutes. The news resumed again. 

It was then that we realized that NORAD didn't know that this was Santa and was going to shoot him down. We started to panic. Mom and Dad were calmly trying to explain that Santa would be alright and everything would be okay. We weren't convinced. I can't say who, but one of us began to cry. "Waaaaah! They're going to kill Santa!" 

Finally, at the end of the News, they broke into the broadcast to report that the Interceptors were nearing the UFO, which had still not responded to radio calls. They put on an audio feed of the interceptors talking with ground control radar and we could hear the pilots as they calmly prepared to blow Santa to Kingdom Come. The planes were just about to fire when the lead pilot established visual contact with the "UFO". He said "It looks like a sleigh pulled by eight tiny reindeer. It's Santa Claus!" Once they realized who it was, they provided him with an aerial escort into U.S. Airspace.

It took my parents about an hour to finally calm down us kids down.

[Frybert]

Just moved up to Wisconsin from Florida. Actually born up this way, but moved south when I was young. The winter seemed to have started kind of late but man is it here now. I live out in the woods down a 600-700 foot driveway. Just finished snowing for third storm got about a foot or so really need to invest in a tractor with a snow blower on it. At least my vehicle is 4wd.

[legoclone09]

Well I type this in a sherpa jacket in Utah.

It's like 10* FREEDOM UNITS outside.

SoCal is so much nicer...

[ProtoJeb21]

After a few weeks of waiting, I finally got the first significant snowfall of the 2016-17 winter season!

Spoiler

A good 6 inches of it piled up prior to noon. I actually took a ruler outside to measure it instead of guessing...for once. At first, it was heavily snowing, with the precipitation being large and quite fluffy. However, around 10-11 am My Time, it began to turn to more of a sleet-like precip. Instead of poofy flakes, it was snowing small hail-like sleet. Over the next hour it built up on the 6 inches of fluffy snow and made a semi-solid, icy crust. The crust's moisture spread to all the accumulation below it, turning all of the fallen snow densely packed. It actually felt like Christmas weather for once! But of course temperatures are going to rise to 55*F tomorrow with heavy rain. And then it'll drop well below freezing. Sigh. Weather, just make sense!

[magnemoe]

16 hours ago, Green Baron said:

It's incredible for someone who hasn't seen that before how many climate- and vegetation-zones there are on a volcanic island.

Concerning temp., there might be snow up there at 2400m (well, a few cm and it won't last long) and people are swimming in the atlantic in 22°C (air and water). The caldera rim is in the line of sight from the beach.

Also, great foto, @James Kerman, messed up my whitebalance for hours ... :-)

 

There is this, I was on Tenerife one of the Canary Islands outside of Morocco, the volcanic peak you could have an snowball fight on while swimming and sunbathing at sea level. 
The mountain area also looked very martian, it has been used for movies set on Mars, red tinted stone dessert. Pretty smart as the sky tend to work well as an bluescreen

I dislike winters, not so much now in an central heated apartment and an good car, but living in an 100 year old house it was cold. 
I considered making an fan to feed more air into the wood stove to increase its effect, dropped it as I remembered that its how you melt iron
managed to overheat that oven anyway so it had to be junked. 

 

[Guest]

Shoveled snow today.  

[Findthepin1]

I commute on foot, and every day I pass this shovelled snow pile next to somebody's driveway that's like five feet tall. I sometimes stick my arm out and knock the top off as I pass it.

I shovelled my backyard this afternoon. Underneath one of the multiple snow piles, there are two Muskoka chairs and a small glass table. 

There's a larger glass table under another snow pile.

Places that haven't been shoveled have more than a foot of snow on the ground. It technically isn't even winter yet.

I gotta be honest, I find it hilarious. 

I like the cold, except when it's too cold, which is a lot of the time. My favourite temperature to be outside in is probably around ten or twelve degrees Celsius (50-54 Fahrenheit). 

Edited December 18, 2016 by Findthepin1