We had quite a snowy day today, with snow accumulating last night and all through the day. This evening at around 7:00, my outside thermometer said it was 25°, so I’m expecting a very cold night! Winter, here we come! But I don’t mind too much, because we have new skis and a six-pack of lift tickets to Solitude for every member of the family except baby McKay. That’ll take the dreary out of winter! For a run-down of several predictions on how hard or mild this winter will be, take a look here.
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Winter rushed in this weekend like a dandelion going to seed. OK, maybe that’s a silly simile. But it did come really fast! My remote thermometer said it got down to 26° on Sunday morning, and it’s been at or below 30° each morning for the past three days. We had some snow on Sunday morning, including this interesting juxtaposition of snow on the pretty little Meidiland roses along my front walk. The snow melted by Sunday afternoon. It’s actually supposed to warm up again this week, getting back into the 70s. But these hard freezes have done their damage,…
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I’m catching up on some cool photos from the past month. This was a nice rainbow in early June, when we were having quite a bit of rain storms. It also shows the cool playhouse/swingset I built for the kids. It was a kit from Toys R Us. Man, that thing was a lot of work! I think it took me about 20 hours to get it done.
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Last week, we had two nights, I think, with low temps around 26°. That’s cold enough to kill some cherry buds, and I’m not sure how mine are doing. By the way, mine are Lapins cherries. This branch is showing a lot of brown cherry blossoms, but I really don’t know if that’s simply what they look like after they’re done or if it was frost damage that created the brown withered look. Despite the presence of some blossoms turning brown, there still were plenty of newly opened blossoms like these ones. I’m pretty sure we’ll get a decent crop…
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This was my backyard last Sunday (March 16) in the morning and then the same shot late that afternoon. Here’s to hoping that the snow is gone for the season! On Tuesday, we were supposed to have a pretty cold storm, and it was for a few hours, but then it blew away and warmed up again that very afternoon. Oh yeah, here are the first flowers of spring, our crocuses:
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Wow! After living here for seven winters, this one just seems to stretch on and on and on! We’ve had snow on the ground constantly since mid-December, if I’m remembering right; that’s almost a month-and-a-half of snow on the ground. In past winters, the snow has always melted within two days after a storm, except for one week in January or February when we’d hit our really low temperatures. But this winter is starting to rival the memories of my wife’s childhood (you know, when they walked to school uphill both ways, barefoot in the snow?). OK, OK, not that…
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I’ve been thinking about different ways to look at the temperature data from my local weather station. Maybe our extreme cold temps have gotten milder, but do we actually have fewer cold days each winter? I decided to look at various thresholds of cold days. A friend plotted some graphs showing the number of days with high temps at various levels, like highs below 30, 20, 10, and such. They didn’t show a real strong trend. Then I decided to plot the number of days with lows at those temperatures. I got some other interesting graphs from it. Take a…
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I’ve been thinking about how people say Utah’s winters aren’t as cold as they used to be, and there isn’t as much snow in the valley as there used to be. Well, I found some great data at a site created by Utah State University, allowing me to download min and max temperatures daily for 60 years at my local weather station (Pleasant Grove). There are other data about precipitation and snow accumulation, I think, but at this point, I just took a look at the minimum winter temperatures and the maximum summer temperatures. It’s startling. I’m shocked to see…