New Hampshire Ski Season Begins!
Bretton Woods is the first area to report 2 of 98 trails open, lifts open. To keep up to date, tune in here: https://www.skinh.com/conditions
Tsunami Warning? No, only a test
Recently browsing the web site, I saw that warnings had been posted for the Portsmouth and Rockingham areas and clicked for more details. The most unbelievable warning popped up — Tsunami Warning! Really? Immediately, the HUGE list of affected areas, starting with “Laguna Madre From the Port of Brownsville to the Arroyo Colorado” had me suspect someone accidentally spilled coffee on the Big Red Button or something. Scrolling, scrolling, scrolling finally got to the actual text, which started out: THIS_MESSAGE_IS_FOR_TEST_PURPOSES_ONLY. Whew! You coulda lead with that…
The alert was gone a moment later.
Hot enuf for ya?
Concord broke an all-time record for this date by an enormous margin of 5°F:
Weather Radio Outage, Gray Maine Office, 26-28 Oct 2024
The Weather Radio transmissions for Gray Maine were off the air from sometime early in the morning on 27 October 2024 until around 5 PM on the 28th. I reported the outage, and was told it was due to a telcom problem, and it was resolved quickly.
A weather radio is an inexpensive item every household should have. It will alert you to urgent weather situations.
Does Anyone Really Know How Hot It Is?
(with apologies to the band Chicago)
Last summer, I was watching temperatures rise in the wicked heat, and I noticed the “feels like” temperature displayed on the weather station web site was sky-high, 108°F on a mid-90 degree day. I checked the reported “feels like” on the local sensor gateway G!100 and on the WeeWx data page, and it was only a few degrees above the plain temperature. What the heck was going on?
Well, it seems like we can’t agree on what “feels like” means. Everyone knows a 90°F day with low humidity and a little breeze is tolerable, if a little hot for us northerners. But the same 90°F with 90 humidity and still winds has everyone reaching for the A/C, a fan, and some ice water.
With the increasing frequency and intensity of the heat, vigorous occupations and sports have focused on the danger of serious heat-related injuries and fatalities. Surely, there must be some standards to apply to the situation.
Well, we like standards so much we’ve made dozens!
“Feels Like” or “Apparent Temperature” is a calculation of temperature and humidity and wind speed created in 1984. While relatively easy to calculate, this really only applies to indoor situations where solar heating is not a factor.
“Humidex” is a similar calculation more common in Canada (and was also the standard on the weather software I was using, hence the difference in values).
Wet-bulb temperature deserves a mention here, although it’s not a measure of “feels like,” but is often confused with the next one. A thermometer is wrapped in a wet cloth sock, and the temperature will differ from dry air temperature by the cooling effect of the water evaporating (absorbing its “latent heat of vaporization” if that rings bells from science classes) and can be used to calculate relative humidity with a simple mechanical device called a “sling psychrometer” and a simple lookup table. This is popular where complex or delicate instrumentation isn’t a good choice, such as the logging industry or grade-school science classes.
Wet bulb globe temperature (WBGT) is currently the most popular for calculating heat stress, the combined effects of temperature, wind, humidity and heat (solar radiation or other heat sources). It uses a dry-air temperature, a wet-bulb temperature for humidity, the temperature inside a black globe exposed to the sun or heat source, and factors in the wind for evaporative effects to create an estimate of how hot it really feels. This estimate is rapidly becoming an important guideline in sports, industry and governmental regulations.
A great article on WGBT can be found here.
Finally, we can’t forget the “RealFeel™” a trademarked and patented proprietary calculation by Accuweather.com. Using similar calculations and factors above, as well as combining special factors of their own, Accu
So, keep in mind when you hear the day is going to “feel like” that there’s a bit of disagreement on what exactly that means, and how it is measured. But, hey, be careful out there.
The Contoocook River Watershed
I was searching for information on the extent of the Contoocook River watershed and came across this map from the New Hampshire Department of Environmental Services here (a 563 KB PDF). I was amazed to see over 30 towns within the watershed! Everything to the east drains into the Merrimack River and on to the Atlantic near Cape Ann, while the western side drains into the Connecticut and Ashuelot Rivers and on to the Atlantic in Long Island Sound.
Misadventure, repaired
Alert weather watchers (do you guys ever take a day off??!!!??) noted that the site went a little sideways yesterday. The main thermometer thought the high and low for the day was 32°F, the winds and other basic parameters were not right, and some of the supplementary pages failed to load or generated a pageful of errors. Hopefully, it’s working better today.
A junior web operator who shall remain nameless attempted to check the web sites’ configuration files into Git and instead loaded in the entire site, including dynamically updated data files and cached files. This means Git will pretty much always report the repository is out of date, and make cloning amd redeployment a serious hazard. In fixing the issue, the problem compounded: it turns out the “git rm” command does not remove the file from git as one might suspect, but instead OBLITERATES THE WORKING FOLDER OF PRODUCTION DATA and marks the file retained in (for historical purposes), but no longer active in the repository. Removing live data and cached files while the website is running had predictably disastrous results. Management has been notified and stern lectures delivered about diddling with the live production site without making three backups while clicking your heels together.
The management wishes to apologize to anyone who just wanted to know what the weather was outside. Yesterday, you would have had to go out IRL and look for yourselves; today, you can check on your phone again.
Updates to the website
Alert readers (I know you’re out there!) have noted that the Wunderground forecasts stopped updating recently. I had updated the API key provided to me by WU in exchange for posting my station’s data on their site. but I missed a portion of the update. The website continued onward, requesting updates from WU, logging the failed access, and republishing the out-of-date forecasts, I had no clue this was stuck, and I’ll look at finding a better way to monitor this. Currently, the script just logs errors into comments in the resulting web page, rather than writing out a log visible on the separate status /results page. I’ll see if I can patch this in.
While debugging this, I noted a couple of scripts were recently updated:
The Sun/Moon astronomy page has been updated with slicker graphics and a pretty neat graph showing moon and sun factoids (azimuths, elevation, zenith, etc.).
“It’s Another Yankee Forecast” – wazzatmean?
“It’s Another Yankee Forecast” was a handy and memorable name for a site I’ve owned for many years, and adapted to my latest hobby of weather observation. It refers to the old chestnut, “if you don’t like New England weather, just wait a minute” which was coined by … Mark Twain? Unlikely. Will Rogers? Nyah-uh. Like Yogi Berra, who may or may not have said, “I never said half the things I said,” the quote is attributed to many places and authors, but most likely should be credited to “Anon.” The great site, Quote Investigator has an indepth article here: “If You Don’t Like Our Weather, Just Wait a Few Minutes.”
I enjoyed the article’s citation of a Mark Twain speech he actually did make, which included a couple of great quotes, like:
There is a sumptuous variety about the New England weather that compels the stranger’s admiration—and regret.
and:
Yes, one of the brightest gems in the New England weather is the dazzling uncertainty of it.
The fun of New England weather is to grab a light jacket and sunglasses to walk the dog, only to be hit with a blizzard whiteout halfway home, or bundling up on a blustery fall day only to be ripping off layers in the tropical heat minutes later.
Wicked Dry September
We have received around one-sixth of an inch of rain in the first 19 days of September and temperatures have been pretty consistently peaking in the 80s. My area in New Hampshire averages around 4 inches a month every month of the year and the climate depends on it. Three weeks without rain is far from a disaster, but it puts a strain on the fall season. Lawns go brown and dormant when they should be growing in a cool, wet season. Fall foliage is turning brown and falling a little earlier than usual.
Fortunately, the forecast predicts we won’t see another day in the 80s this month, and we should see some rain next week. Hopefully, the foliage will recover and give us a good year, and a little rain will get the lawns back in shape.