North American Fruit Explorers mailing list at ibiblio

["Kieran &/or Donna" <holycow@frontiernet.net>]

 

Jim, 

    I don't know if you are aware of this website.  I play with it now and then.  I was thinking that the kind of summer you northerners had could influence not only your winter, but ours as well.  So I chose northern hemisphere and June 1 as my starting date, and had it build an animation for the max 20 day period.  Looks like the jet stream dipped down your way in early June and you were pretty chilly about June 5.  I expect you keep some sort of weather records.  You can go back for the last few years and see what kind of jet stream movement brought what kind of weather to you. 

     While I was in England in the late 70's, I got hold of a book that talked about the jet stream.  It said, if I remember correctly, that the northern jet stream tended to make a sort of 4 pointed star in response to various objects in it's way and it's natural tendencies.  When they were having heat waves and drought in England in 1975 and 76, it was because the jet stream had switched into a sort of 5 pointed star.  It wasn't going up and down at the usual places.  And that can change the weather dramatically in quite a few places.  I noticed looking at the June map I had going that there was a high over Iceland at one point, I wonder if it tends to be a standing high like the Bermuda high.  In the drought in the late 80's the Bermuda high came over and sat on Atlanta and kept all the rain off us for most of 4 long years.  It drove the rainfall up along the northern edge of KY and soaked Ohio. 

    Anyway, I was just having a look and thought you might want to do the same during what may be a long cold winter for you.  Looks like ours will be a long wet one, perhaps cold too.  Certainly we had little of the intense dry heat that characterized '05 and '07, and closer to the more usual steam bath in '06 and '08.  This year was more like 14- 15 years ago, after we bought our property.  I remember the summer that it rained 14" in June and our shoes rotted.   I guess the group might enjoy this website, but I'll have to remove references to long term climate.  Donna

 

So if any of ya'll are stuck indoors today, you may enjoy this.  Get out your calendar and look up those red letter weather days, and animate the map to show you why it happened.  I myself am in a nice warm office about to go get some wet chickens and take them home to a wet cage, pat some wet dogs and curl up with a book.  Or maybe it's mostly done and I can get out in my wet tennis shoes to move some brush piles. 

http://virga.sfsu.edu/crws/archive/jetstream_archive.html