North Pole Weather 4/23/12

The snow is melting rapidly, the path to the shed is shoveled, and the tricycle is out – I rode about a mile yesterday. We’re forecast to have highs in the 50’s next week, though it’s still below freezing at night and could be below zero. I’m going to plant the beans (indoors) this week. Spring is coming!

It’s light almost all the time I’m awake, now – sunrise today was 5:44 in the morning, and it won’t set until 9:56 this evening for 16 hours 12 minutes of daylight, almost 7 minutes more than yesterday. The closed car now gets so hot I’ve turned on the air conditioning. We only have a couple more days of nautical night – starting April 25 the sun will never dip more than 12° below the horizon.

Pussy willows are out, and I took a few pictures from the trike. The weeds are turning green (aren’t they always the first?) and I’ve spotted new growth on delphiniums, violets, columbine, and hardy geraniums against the house even though I haven’t raked the leaf mulch out yet. Chives are showing green, too, with a nice onion flavor. It’s far too early for rototilling – there are still patches of snow in the garden, and I’m sure it’s still frozen solid, but I’ve started visiting the commercial greenhouses. Plant Kingdom had a good assortment of mints, and I bought 11, but my favorite (Corsican mint) wasn’t there. Don’t know why it’s so hard to get hold of. Maybe they’ll have it at one of the three I haven’t been to yet.

Ice Jam Floods

When do you expect flooding?

It depends very much on where you are, of course, and what causes the flooding. Here in interior Alaska we have two flood seasons, with two quite different mechanisms, and we’re starting into one of them now, at the driest time of the year.

Yes, April is our driest month and May, while a little wetter, is the second driest month with temperatures above freezing. So why flooding now? Why not in the rainiest month, August, which did produce the great Fairbanks Flood of 1967?

Two words: ice jams.

We’re already getting some information on river breakup and flood warnings. In fact, there is an ice jam flood advisory on the Tanana River near the mouth of the Salcha (upstream of Fairbanks) today and tomorrow. Most of the rivers in Alaska run from highlands with snow — lots of snow — in the winter months to coasts that during the spring are a lot colder than the interior where the snow is melting under the sun. The snow melts and the meltwater runs into the river while the lower reaches of the river are still frozen. As the river rises and the sun weakens the ice that has covered it over the winter, the ice breaks into chunks and slabs and begins to flow with the river. It used to be axiomatic that rivers could not be crossed, and bridges were often swept away, during breakup, when the ice is carried downriver. When I came to Fairbanks it was still a possibility that the last car of the year over the ice bridge across the Chena River would go through the ice. The great gambling event of the Alaskan Spring is the Nenana Ice Pool – wagering on the exact day, hour, and minute that the ice will go out at Nenana, Alaska.

But all that ice moving downriver can cause problems, too. It’s not wimpy, thin ice; the ice at Nenana is over 2’ thick today, and while it’s thinned from is original 3 ½ feet, it still makes big chunks. If it piles up, as may happen at a different place every year, the flow of water is severely impeded, and the water spreads out over the adjacent land. Rivers in Alaska are transportation corridors – not only for boats in the summer, but for dog teams and snow machines in the winter. Consequently most of the older settlements in Alaska are on this precursor to our skimpy road net, and they almost expect to be flooded in spring. Fuel lines and tanks must be tied down, as must boardwalks, lest they float off. Belongings are put up high. I expect the public service announcements warning residents to prepare for flooding to start soon.

By the way, notice that our wettest month has an average precipitation of under 2″, and the annual total is only 10.31″. In terms of total precipitation, I live in a desert.

North Pole Weather, 4/16/12

Sunrise this morning was 6:10 pm, with sunset not until 9:33 this afternoon for 15 hours 23 minutes of daylight. We’re still gaining almost 7 minutes a day, but the snow, while pretty wet lately, is far from gone. The snow stake shows just under a foot still on the ground. There’s been enough melting that the path to the shed (and the tricycle) is impossible to shovel – it’s ice. Too bad, as they’ve plowed the bicycle path, though the tenth of a mile of dirt road to get to it is a horrible mixture of mud, ice, and potholes. But the edges of the raised beds are poking out of the snow, and at this rate I’ll be able to see the soil in the beds beds themselves pretty soon. It was actually above freezing this morning at 7 am.

I’ve started wearing my athletic shoes when I go anywhere, just tossing the boots in the car in case I encounter ice. I’m actually getting to attend evening functions, like The Stoned Guest (P.D.Q. Bach) Friday night. I need to start the beans next week, and the squash the week after that. Time to start visiting the greenhouses, too – I rely on them for culinary herb plants and flowers.

If only I weren’t so busy with OLLI classes this month! Northern vegetation changes and archaeological science Monday, iPhoto and digital photography Wednesday, astrophysics Friday, and a weekend workshop on fiction writing at the beginning of next month. Hope I can remember to keep the plants watered!

p.s. at 4 pm: temperature +57°F and I had to take off my jacket and turn on the air conditioning driving home! Still plenty of snow, though — the snow stake says 8″, though lots of bare ground, as well as mud and puddles,  are showing.

Breakup Season

The usual four seasons, especially as defined by the equinoxes and solstices, don’t work very well for interior Alaska. Show cover is generally established by a month after the autumnal equinox, and stays on the ground until well after the vernal equinox. Rivers freeze a little later and remain frozen longer in the spring, and the only running water for six months of the year is in hot springs and indoors. But there is one season that everyone both longs for and dreads: Breakup.

Breakup is the time of year when snow melts and rivers thaw. The two are connected by more than sunshine and warmer weather. Melting snow makes mud (one of the reasons breakup is a time of some dread) but it also runs into rivers. If the water rises in the upper stretches of a river before lower reaches are thawed, as often happens in Alaska, the result can be ice jams and resultant flooding. I’ll talk about that some other time, but right now I want to discuss the simple process of melting snow.

Clean snow reflects most of the solar energy that strikes it. Some of the sun’s rays are absorbed within the snow pack, and cause internal melting and settling — but this is a slow process. Even clean snow, however, is a very good absorber in thermal infrared wavelengths. The sun doesn’t put out much energy in these wavelengths, but buildings, trees, and just about everything else except polished metal does. As a result, snow near the south side of a building melts much faster than snow out in the open. So does snow near tree trunks.

I see this every year. In addition to the photo of my road, which is rapidly turning into mud, I took two of the north and south yards of my house, minutes apart. Both areas got almost exactly the same amount of snow, and both have very similar exposure to sunlight. The snow stake still has a good 18” of snow. The ground around the birch is almost bare.

Why? Two reasons, actually, and the combination explains why open birch forest is usually the first natural area free of snow around here. First, birch trees hold their seeds through winter, and drop them shortly before breakup. As a result the seeds on the snow around the tree absorb the solar radiation and transfer that energy to the snow, speeding its melt. Natural selection? Quite possibly. It certainly seems likely that the enhanced snow melt, leading to earlier warming of the ground, would help the tree.

Second, the tree itself absorbs some solar energy, and then re-radiates it to the snow in the form of thermal infrared. Just about any object poking through the snow this time of year has a little depression around it. Spruce trees do an even better job of absorbing sunlight than do birches, but they also shade the ground and transfer much of the energy they absorb directly to the air. As a result spruce forest, while it probably does a better job of warming the air than birch forest, is among the last areas to have completely bare ground.

On a different note entirely, one of the fixtures of breakup in Fairbanks is the Beat Beethoven 5 km race, a fundraiser held today for and by the Fairbanks Symphony Orchestra. I won’t be running this year, though I did “run” with a cane once — and came in last. The idea is to cover the 5 km before the end of Beethoven’s 5th Symphony, about 30 minutes. I’m volunteering this year to park my car along the race route with the radio tuned to 91.5 (KSUA, the campus radio station) blaring out Beethoven’s 5th. I expect temperatures below 50°F and much of the course to be slippery or wet!

Added later (after the race.) This is definitely a family race. There were parents pushing their children in strollers, parents with children in backpacks or riding piggyback, dogs, and one contestant on crutches. (And she wasn’t at the end, either.) I did have a bit of a problem in that instruction to volunteers said if possible, not to have your car idling as the runner went by. I did. And needed a jump to start the car after the battery totally discharged itself.

North Pole Weather 4/9/12

Snow stake the afternoon of April 8. Comparison with last week's will show how slowly clean snow is melting. (No, we haven't had any additional snow.)

The sun rose at 6:36 this morning and will set at 9:08 this evening, for 14 hours 35 minutes of daylight — we’re still gaining 6 min 48 seconds a day. We’re paying for it, though, as it never gets completely dark at night. The sun never dips more than 18° below the horizon, so while it’s probably darker than most of North America (minor street light pollution) it never quite reaches astronomical night. The stars come out, but we can’t see the faintest ones. (I can’t anyway, so I have to say the only personal effect on me is the longer evenings.)

Breakup has definitely arrived. The white ice on streets and parking lots is either soft enough that tires sink in, or has been replaced by pools of water. Since the ground is generally colder than the sun-heated surface, drainage culverts are full of ice and the parking lots, especially those with dips, become ponds. The steam thawing trucks will be out soon, though I haven’t seen any yet.

Clean snow is sagging from internal melt. I’ve been watching the snow sag against the snow stake. It’s down to about 21” now, but it seems an awfully slow process. Darkened areas, or those next to something like a tree or wall, are melting much faster. I have bare patches showing where I had several inches of white ice in the driveway, and shrubs that were surrounded by tents of snow are now the focus of hollows.

Speaking of those nice long evenings, I’m planning to attend the opera this coming Friday. Yes, in Fairbanks Alaska. Opera Fairbanks, which bills itself as the farthest North professional opera company, is having a fund-raiser with P.D.Q. Bach’s The Stoned Guest and desserts. (Hooray for an insulin pump—though I don’t do this sort of thing very often.) It’s only a half act, and starts at 7, so I should be able to drive home. Sunset that day will be almost 9:30 in the evening. What, you’ve never heard of P.D.Q Bach? (1807-1742) Suffice it to say I expect all kinds of musical jokes.

North Pole Weather 4/2/12

Snowstake this morning. I've cropped it so the bottom of the stake is about at the bottom of the picture.

The sun rose at 7:01 am and won’t set until 8:49 this evening, for a total of 13 hours 41 minutes of daylight. Astronomical night doesn’t start until after midnight, and by a week from now we won’t have astronomical night at all, as the sun will never get more than 18° below the horizon. By the middle of the month, when a performance of P.D.Q. Bach’s The Stoned Guest is scheduled, civil twilight will last almost an hour after sunset, and I should be able to drive myself there and home even though I can’t drive in the dark.

It’s warming up, and it was actually into the forties for a couple of days last week. Snow has pretty well disappeared from fence rails and the top of the lattice. Water has been dripping from the roof, and I’ve actually seen a puddle or two. Temperatures this weekend have been a little cooler, staying slightly below freezing. But by next weekend they should be back into the forties, and breakup should start getting underway in earnest.

This is the time of year I start getting really impatient—it’s usually clear and sunny, and I get eager for the snow, still almost 2’ deep, to go away! The road crews have pushed the berms way back on the main roads, and I’ve even seen a couple of short stretches of bicycle paths cleared, to the great annoyance of the snowmachiners who use them in the winter.  I wish the snow would melt enough I could get to the shed and free my tricycle!

Cold-packed Snow: White Ice

This pile of white ice chunks was scraped off the OLLI parking lot. As you can see, the lot is still white.

I’ve talked about snow that is undisturbed without a temperature gradient, and about disturbed snow without pressure. Today we’re going to take that a step farther and look at snow that is disturbed by pressure—specifically, by car or foot traffic—when temperatures are below freezing. Here in Alaska we call it white ice, and the less-traveled roads and almost all the parking lots are solid white ice this time of year.

Wind or an avalanche will break snow crystals, but it doesn’t in itself press the broken grains together. Walking or driving over dry snow, however, not only breaks the crystals, it also presses them together. If it is near freezing, the pressure may even cause slight melting. In any event the crystals are very firmly welded together. The result is a mass that has some air trapped—that’s why it looks white. But it may be only a little less dense than ice, and is only slightly softer. An icebreaker or a sharp-edged shovel will generally break it much more easily than it will break true ice, but white ice is definitely solid.

Some of the chunks of white ice removed from the road I live on.

As a driving surface, white ice is something most Alaskan drivers learn to deal with. It is not impossibly slippery if it is not polished or near freezing temperature, though most of us drive on it with caution and learn to feather our brakes. Mine are anti-skid, but I’ve learned to brake softly enough that the anti-lock feature almost never engages—except at intersections.  Those are often polished to the point that they are extremely slick, even though graveled.

Yes, graveled. We don’t use salt much because our temperatures are generally so low that even salt water freezes and salt simply will not melt ice. Salt’s used on sidewalks sometimes, but in cold weather each salt pellet simply melts its way down to the pavement without having much effect on the main ice mass—except to make it slicker.

Notice the step left when one lane of my road was plowed a couple of days ago.

The road I live on is gravel, and a coating of white ice actually improves it. But it does do some things you might not think about to paved roads.

First, it covers any marking painted on the road or parking lot—lane markings, turn arrows, lines that mark parking spaces.

Second, it can at times be thick enough that when part of a road is cleared in the spring, a considerable drop-off may result.

Third, and especially a problem when it is overcast and the light is flat, is whiteout conditions. It’s not as bad as in an airplane north of tree line when the pilot may not even be able to see which way is up, but telling what is road and what is not can be very difficult when the road is white ice and the verge is snow and both are exactly the same color. It’s hard to see even with directional light and shadows, but in flat light everything looks the same.

I managed to high-center my car a few weeks ago taking an exit between a four-lane highway and a major side road. The exit was pure white ice, and I couldn’t quite see what was road and what was the curbed triangle between the side road and the exit. I wound up on the triangle and had to be pulled off by a tow truck. Neither the trooper who stopped to see if I needed help nor the tow truck driver seemed to have the slightest problem understanding how I’d gotten there, or even consider my situation unusual. “Whiteout”  was all the explanation I needed.

Disturbance Hardening of Snow

Ever notice that the berm across the end of your driveway, or the one formed when you shovel the sidewalk, is harder than the undisturbed snow? That’s because when snow is disturbed crystals are broken, and the broken surfaces positively grab onto other ice surfaces. Two examples of this are common in nature, and I’ve used both in my fiction writing.

The first is called a wind slab or wind crust. When a turbulent wind picks up snow crystals and redeposits them, a good deal of crystal breakage takes place. When the broken crystals settle down they weld themselves to other crystals and the result can be a hard crust—even though the temperature is below freezing. Roi has to cope with this in Tourist Trap:

The trees had broken the force of the wind up to now, but once he entered the open swath the wind almost knocked him off his feet. The snow was crusted here, not quite enough to hold his weight, but enough that his thighs were bruised repeatedly by the chunks of wind-slabbed snow he was dragging Timi through. He paused twice to increase the circulation to his feet. Were they cold, hurting like hell, or just numb? he wondered absently, and then realized that Timi’s shields had dropped to the point that he was feeling Timi’s body as well as his own. The wind cut through the frozen scarf and the cold glued his eyelashes shut, and with a start of horror he realized that he had drifted away from the line back to the shelter. He could teleport himself back, maybe—but he wasn’t sure he had the energy left to do even that, and there was no way he could take Timi with him.

He struggled on: lift a leg and break the crust with his knee, then drag the leg through the slightly softer snow underneath until he could balance on that leg to break out the next step with the other leg. Timi staggered behind him, almost falling several times, and his mind ached from the effort of keeping the other boy upright. Snow had sifted into his clothing, somehow, and he knew he was cold but no longer felt it. With an abruptness that caught him by surprise, the wind died down, and he went to his knees as he tried to break through a crust that was no longer there. Back in the trees, he finally realized, and reached out for the faint impression of the shelter.

The second is probably less familiar to most, and I hope it remains so, but here in Alaska it is constantly being drummed into us. This is what happens in an avalanche. The churning snow sets up like concrete as soon as it comes to a halt. Well, not quite like concrete — it can be dug through with shovels – but far too hard to shift by moving your body. Marna is caught in an avalanche in Homecoming:

Even as she crouched and aimed herself for a belt of trees that might provide some protection, the leading edge of the avalanche overran her, tumbling her helplessly down the slope. The churning snow caught and twisted one forceweb until she thought her leg would break, but the torsion activated the safety cutoffs and the forcewebs went abruptly inert. She clawed her way upward through the fast-moving snow, and tried to remember what lay downhill. Only her perceptive sense kept her from total disorientation.

The buffeting and spinning as she was carried along reminded her of the time she had been caught in the breaking wave—but then Win had been there to rescue her. Win. She had repudiated whatever was left of Win, but as the slowing mass suddenly set rigidly about her body, she wondered at her own insanity in wanting to be alone. She struggled to move, but felt only the slight snapping of a switch, followed by the growing cold of the snow that held her prisoner. Her struggles must have turned off the thermal suit, she realized with a growing sense of despair. Exhausted and chilled, she could not even visualize a place of safety. Win, she sobbed mentally. Forgive me, my love.

This is a situation where time is absolutely essential, and buried but living victims are likely to die of suffocation or cold – often in less time than it takes to get help. Dogs are better than people at finding victims, but if search and rescue dogs have to be flown in, it is often too late to find anything but a body.

North Pole Weather 3/19/12 and #WriteMotivation

No, that's not Alaska! My sister took this photo this past weekend in California. I couldn't resist sharing the snow-covered palms.

The sun rose (past tense!) this morning at 7:53 and will set this evening at 8:06, for 12 hr 13 min of daylight. What, you say, more than 12 hours when the equinox isn’t until tomorrow? The combination of atmospheric refraction and the finite diameter of the sun always ensures that the day is a little longer than geometry would have it, and as far as I’m concerned, it’s spring!

Not in temperature. That’s been above zero most days and below zero most nights, and there’s been virtually no melting of the snow so far. It has, however, settled. A week ago we had close to 2 ½’ on the ground; today it’s just a little over 2’. The sun, when it’s out, is high enough that a fair amount of energy is absorbed within the snowpack, and the bonds between crystals are slowly collapsing. I don’t think we’re losing any mass yet, though, except by evaporation. We can get 40 below this late,  so I’m not complaining about temperatures in the teens.

Besides, look what my sister ran into day before yesterday in California!

It’s light long enough in the evening now I can get out and do things. Yesterday afternoon I attended a matinee performance of The Music Man put on by FLOT, and was actually able to drive home in daylight afterwards.

#WriteMotivation:

One thing that wasn’t on the list: I made transfers from my book cover, with the award sticker, and applied them to a tote bag and T-shirt. I also revamped my bookmarks.

1. Learn to use at least one legal method of getting images other than photos I’ve taken on my blog. DONE, though I’m still looking for an African brush fire for next week.

2. Continue to blog at least 5 days a week. (I’m doing 7 now, but I’ve signed up for a number of adult classes in March.)  On Track. I’ve posted every day so far this month, and I have 7 written and scheduled for the 12 days remaining. The other 5 are still in the idea stage, but I do have ideas. And I’ve made my OLLI classes so far, even the day I managed to high-center the car in a whiteout and had to get it pulled out by a tow truck.

3. Edit Chs 2 and 9 of my WIP to give more showing, less telling. (Ch 2 has been on Six Sentence Sunday; Ch 9 is the next section from Tod’s POV.)  I haven’t even looked at Chapter 9 yet.

4. Participate in at least one Platform-building challenge. I did both.

North Pole Weather and #WriteMotivation Check In

The sun will rise at 8:18 (thanks to daylight savings) but it will not set until 7:41 this evening. Thanks, Alaska legislature, for putting us closer to the East coast, time-wise, while totally ignoring our true longitude. (Nome has times when the sun doesn’t rise until afternoon, and even we in Fairbanks have sunsets the next day in midsummer.) Anyway we’re up to 11 hours 26 minutes of daylight, and still gaining about 6 min 44 seconds a day. Temperatures are well blow 0 at night, 5 to 20 above in the daytime. Perfect for the ice carvings.

We’re suddenly getting the snow we missed earlier this year. My snow stake says almost 30” now, and I may have to get the driveway plowed again. My all-wheel drive can get in and out, but just barely. Earlier it was easy to keep the snow rolled down, and the main reason for plowing a couple of weeks ago was to get rid of the packed snow before breakup.

WriteMotivation check in:

1. Learn to use at least one legal method of getting images other than photos I’ve taken on my blog. (I’d love to have some shots of Africa on Jarn’s Journal, for instance.) Done, I hope. At least I got a shot of Victoria Falls up this week, and changed the header on JarnianConfederation.wordpress.com.

2. Continue to blog at least 5 days a week. (I’m doing 7 now, but I’ve signed up for a number of adult classes in March.)  On track; I’ve blogged every day so far this month.

3. Edit Chs 2 and 9 of my WIP to give more showing, less telling. (Ch 2 has been on Six Sentence Sunday; Ch 9 is the next section from Tod’s POV.)  Still need to get to Ch 9.

4. Participate in at least one Platform-building challenge — I hesitate to commit for more without knowing what they are. Participated in both (Give Us This Day and Dreams) and advanced to the second stage in both.

Oh, and in case anyone missed it, I found out Wednesday that my second novel with iUniverse, Tourist Trap, won Best Fiction Book of 2011 as well as first place in science fiction in the Reader Views literary awards! I’ve been busy modifying all of my web presences to reflect this, which has taken up a lot of my writing and promoting time the last week.