Wednesday, February 25, 2009

Waiting for the jet to leave

The weather has been tricky lately, as regular readers know. We had three feet of snow over the period Thursday to Sunday, and now, with all that snow still on the ground, are expecting rain Friday and over the weekend. That will make for avalanches in our mountains, if it falls as rain that high up.

But for right now it's 2 degrees F. Pretty cold for nearly March! In like a lion.

The weather in this part of the world is dominated by the jet stream and it's wave-like form (Rossby waves). The jet stream moves north and south with the season, while the waves meander from west to east across the northern hemisphere.

As that jet stream moves south each fall, we advance into winter with a snowstorm pretty much every time the wave meanders over Maine, followed by a clear spell of cold Canadian air while we're in the trough of the wave.

As the wave meanders north, spring comes in lurches. The storms that accompany each wave front first turn to sleet, then all rain. After each storm it gets cold and clear, but less so each week. Each rain storm also reduces the snow cover a bit, until the jet stream finally migrates north out of the region in April, after which we get much warmer weather.

I'd heard it said that this was an La Nina year, which makes the waves deeper and more southerly. I wondered how and went on line to wikipedia to find this good diagram.

I guess the whole point of this post is to let you all know that spring will eventually come. Don't worry for us. We're used to it.

By April we'll have tomato starts, lambs and frogs everywhere. And mud. Lots and lots of mud.

Out like a lamb. A muddy lamb.

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Welcome to our Farm Blog.
The purpose of this blog is for Aimee and I to communicate with friends and family, with those of our students, and other folks in general who are interested in homesteading and farming activities.

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