March 5, 2008

(Happy Birthday P.!)

The weather is typical of the month.

Two days ago, we had freezing rain. Thankfully, it melted quickly but I was glad to have my YakTrax walking to work, especially after I saw one student fall hard on the slippery sidewalk.

They have been working away at the construction site, in spite of the weather. Yesterday, I noticed they had a Stone Slinger working at the foundations. I first encountered one of these machines at the Habitat for Humanity Build in the Summer and it was fun to recognize it.

Everything really starts melting when the sun comes out and I have noticed an appreciable reduction in the snow pile over the last few days.

Unfortunately, this morning it had all come back. Sorry about how crooked the photo is but I was trying for a quick snap before the ice pellets blew in the door. We face East and that's the way the wind is coming this morning. Gusting to 41 kph.

Out the back, it looks like we won't be barbequing for a while. But you know, that's deceptive because once it starts to melt, it really gathers momentum. We might have the bikes out before the end of the month! I live in hope.

January 31, 2008

It's almost Groundhog Day.
Someone at the weather office is getting creative with the writing. There is a weather watch up on the main website and when I clicked on it I read the following:
"Meanwhile a low pressure area over west Texas is getting organized and setting its sights on southern Ontario."

December 3, 2007

Not many adventures today, although it snowed a lot and is still snowing. I walk to work so it's not a big deal when it snows - no spinning my wheels in the driveway. However, the plows had been out by the time I was walking at 7:30 and they had shoved all the snow from the road to the edges of the sidewalks. This meant there was a very large (and dense) snow bank to clamber over if you wanted to cross the street. Which I did at several points. I wore my knee-high boots and I still got snow down one.

As usual, whoever they have plowing around the old Nepean City Hall is extremely efficient and I was able to walk by that building complex without an effort.

By 9:30 I was making my way over to the GoodLife gym at the Loblaws and the parking lot was still in the process of being plowed - I think it was a continuous kind of job today. They have to shove all that snow somewhere and then come get it later and take it away in trucks to the big city snow dump.

Here's another giant pile of snow over behind the Marshy's. And it's not done yet. Here's the website I use for constant monitoring of the weather. You can get to the radar and satellite and everything there. So far, they say we had 5mm of "precipitation" yesterday. The website goes on to explain:

Q.
What does Yesterday's Precipitation Total mean? Does it include snowfall?
A.
"Yesterday's Total Precipitation", in the table on the "5 day weather page", is a total of all the types of precipitation that may have fallen on the previous day including: rain, drizzle, freezing drizzle, freezing rain, hail and snow.
The unit used to express "Yesterday's Total Precipitation" is millimetres. Therefore any snow that has fallen is melted and this amount of liquid water is recorded in millimetres and added to any other amounts from other forms of precipitation (i.e. rain). Even if snow was the only type of precipitation to fall on the previous day, the snow is melted and the water equivalent is reported in millimetres.

and...

In many snow events a ratio of 10 to 1 can be applied to the amount of snow to determine its water equivalent. In other words, 1 centimetre of snow is equivalent to about 1 millimetre of water once the snow is melted. This means that in many snowfall situations (on days when only snow fell), you can simply change the units from millimetres to centimetres on the "Yesterday's Precip. Total" on a specific location's weather page to get a reasonably good idea of how much snow fell.

So we had 5 cm of snow "yesterday". I'll have to check tomorrow, to see what we had today!