Tuesday, January 8, 2008

Weather Watch

Today it was freakishly warm out.  Hot even.  Peter and I skied and it was brutal -- pushing around heavy snow and sweating.   The air felt like summer.  The sun felt like summer.  And the conditions were classic spring -- melting, brown spots, bare spots, the feeling that skiing will soon be a thing of the past.

And yet ... it is January.  Winter has a long way to go.  I decided to check out winter's past to get an idea of what type of weather we've weathered in January.   The information is certainly not scientific -- and you can make your own deductions.  Mine is that January is just a screwed up month!


January, 2003

By Jan. 9 of this year I had skied 10 times.  This was a big snow year -- we received over a foot on Christmas day.  Hallie was on Mountain Classroom this year.

January, 2004

On Jan. 8 there were freezing temperatures, like 14 below.  I had skied 7 times by this date.  On Dec. 28th it was in the high 40's.  Most of January was frigid, and on Feb. 2 it was back into the high 40's.

January, 2005

I had skied 7 times by the 8th and it snowed a couple of inches that day.  On Jan. 4 there were spring conditions, on Jan. 6 there was no school due to lots of snow.

January, 2006

I had skied 7 times by the 8th, but there was not much snow.  Grace and I hiked Mt. Kearsarge on the 11th (there was no snow).  According to my notes, it was awesome!  There was no cold spell at all (during Jan.) this year.

January, 2007

I skied once by the 8th, and on that actual date skiing (race team) was cancelled due to the fact it was raining cats and dogs.  By the 16th there were "cold temps at last!"  No snow though.

Which brings us to 2008.

Thus far it has been really cold, we've had tons of snow and on the 8th it was nearly 60 degrees.

So what are your deductions?  January has been kind of wacky for the past five years, either being crazy cold or no snow or tons of snow.  There are no patterns other than there is no pattern.  But I still can't get the picture of the polar bear swimming and swimming and swimming because the polar ice caps are melting.  

Today just felt wrong.  But I had to mention it!

1 comment:

Cheryl said...

I completely agree. Today was WRONG. I have said it many times and almost everyone I have spoken too - even kids - young ones - have said that the weather today is too weird. I DON'T LIKE IT!