metachronistic

We got 2 inches of snow yesterday (October 26th), so the wait is finally over.

I made the mistake of riding my bicycle to work yesterday, as the snow was falling. It wasn’t too bad on my way in to work, but by the time I left, more than an inch of snow had fallen and the roads hadn’t been plowed. I do have studded, knobby tires on my bicycle, but they’re don’t work very well in situations where the snow is deeper than the tread. I managed to stay upright the whole way home, but it was some white-knuckle, one-wheel drive bicycling.

Note: Yesterday’s first real snowfall was the 8th latest in the 62 year historical record I have access to for the Fairbanks airport station. I’m not sure where the statistics reported in Tuesday’s newspaper came from.

It’s been almost a month since I last discussed the first true snowfall date (when the snow that falls stays on the ground for the entire winter) in Fairbanks, and we’re still without snow on the ground. It hasn’t been that cold yet, but the average temperature is enough below freezing that the local ponds have started freezing. Without snow, there’s a lot of ice skating going on around town. I’m hoping to head out this weekend and do some skating on the pond in the photo above. Still, most folks in Fairbanks are hoping for snow.

Since my last post, I’ve gotten access to data from the National Climate Data Center, and have been working on getting it all processed into a database. I’ve worked out a procedure for processing the daily COOP data, which means I can repeat my earlier snow depth analysis with a longer (and more consistent) data set. The following figure shows the same basic analysis as in my previous post, but now I’ve got data from 1948 to 2008.

The latest date for the first true snowfall was November 11th, 1962, and we’re almost three weeks away from that date. But we’re also on the right side of the distribution—the mean (and median) date is October 14th, and we’re 9 days past that with no significant snow in the forecast. I’ve also marked the earliest (September 13th, 1992) and latest (November 1st, 1997) first snowfall dates in recent history. 1992 was the year the snow fell while the leaves were still on the trees, causing major power outages and a lot of damage. I think 1997 was the year that we didn’t get much snow at all, which caused a lot of problems for water and septic lines buried in the ground. A deep snowpack provides a good insulating layer that keeps buried water lines from freezing and in 1997 a lot of things froze.

This is also the time of the year when some of the winter birds start making themselves less scarce. We saw our first Pine Grosbeaks of the year, three days later than last year’s first observation, a Northern Goshawk flew over a couple weeks ago, and we got some great views of this Great Horned Owl on Saturday. Andrea took some spectacular photos with her digital camera, and I experimented with my iPhone and the scope we bought in Homer this year. It’s quite a challenge to get the tiny iPhone lens properly oriented with the eyepiece image in the scope, but the photos are pretty impressive when you get it all set up. Even a pretty wimpy camera becomes powerful when looking through a nice scope.

Winter is on it’s way, just a bit late this year. I’ve been taking advantage by riding my bike to work fairly often. Earlier in the week I replaced my normal tires with carbide-studded tires, so I’ll be ready when the ice and snow finally comes.