Weather and politics

So you know that I'm only going to half-piss off half of you!
This morning, when I woke up before 6 to get to the van, I walked out to the kitchen for some breakfast, I noticed that we got a fairly light dusting of snow overnight, well under an inch. However, the recent fairly warm weather combined with that overnight moisture input to turn Albuquerque into an icy mess. The van did not arrive because nobody got on at the first stop (my advisor said that there was a half inch of ice on the parking lot), so we had to drive a car. We had the radio on in the car (conservative talk radio, but I guess I can't complain about not having to drive myself) and heard that they were not only closing schools due to the light snow, but apparently nobody could drive on the ice as there were numerous rollovers reported, and one of the main northern roads connecting the western parts of the valley (Rio Rancho) to main Albuquerque was closed. There was a three hour wait for tow trucks, and they were asking that, if you were in a minor accident, that you wait for awhile to report it so that you don't tie up the police's time. Crazy.
Also, I read short article today about history repeating itself. Now, of course the author is a raging liberal like me, and so I am more inclined to agree, but the facts are I guess undeniable. Two things kill me about this:
1. If this happened in the past with this same cast of characters, why did we let it happen again? Why do we learn nothing from history?
2. Why the hell have I never heard about this until now? The so-called liberal media didn't bring this to our attention back in 2003. Why? I think that if the American public knew that Cheney and Rumsfeld had already tried to pull the old bullshit maneuver in the past to increase "defense" spending, we never would have gone for it.
Depressing. Have a great day!

Two days in the Valles

This week I spent Wednesday and Thursday up in the Valles Caldera with my advisor. We deployed a few more temperature probes and did some sampling. Mostly we got to hike up a streambed in 1-2 feet of snow with snowshoes strapped to our feet!


I have discovered that my old gaiters do not work all that well. The backs did not stay on my boots, instead resting on my socks, which allowed snow to get into my boots. My feet were therefore damn cold by the end of the first day. Eventually I thawed out. Check out the windblown snow we saw about halfway up:


The second day we hurried up the catchment and did some more sampling up at the top. It was a productive couple of days, and we brainstormed some good ideas for furthering my research. Hopefully things really get moving this winter! I'll hopefully be spending much of the spring (post-snowmelt) up in the Valles.

Welcome, winter weather.

I got up at 6:12 this morning to get myself down to my vanpool. I usually try to get up at 5:40 (my alarm goes off at 5:30) so I can shower and maybe even eat breakfast. This morning I had to sacrifice both to laziness. I left the house at 6:30, and arrived at the parking lot just a little before 6:40. The van is supposed to pick us up at 6:45, but that time came and went with no sign of a van. This happened once recently, and that time there was only one person at the north stop (I board the van at the second, south stop), and he apparently didn't want to drive because he sat there and waited for a long time before deciding to drive down. He also almost ran us off the road, leading to my first experience driving the vanpool van. But that's another story.
The van never showed up, but a car of usual van-riders did arrive around 6:50 to 6:55. Four of them piled out of a fairly small car. There were two of us waiting at the south stop for the van. Hmm. I decided not to go down to Socorro today because of that, and am instead working from Albuquerque. This fact has allowed me to observe the winter weather happening down here near the Rio Grande this fine day.

7:00 a.m.: When I started biking home, it was overcast and nothing was going on. Right around 7, we started getting an extremely light snow. Very exciting; I haven't been snowed on since last year. That snow steadily increased as I got home and walked Alison back to her bus stop for her trip to work. By the time I got home, a little bit had actually accumulated.

8:30 a.m.: By this time, the snow had stopped completely. We had probably about a tenth of an inch or so of accumulation. I took this picture:


10:00 a.m.: Most of the snow has sublimated or melted away. I figure this is the last of our winter weather today.

11:30 a.m.: The sun is out and shining in through the skylight above me.

12:02 p.m.: Graupel starts, up to pea-sized. At first I thought it was hail because it was hitting the skylight pretty hard. But no, it was just graupel. Large graupel lasts only a few minutes, and turns into very small grains of the stuff.

12:15 p.m.: Graupel stops. Within five minutes, much of the clouds have gone away and the sun is shining again. It looks pretty clear to the west, which is where our weather tends to come from this time of year. Out east looks damn ugly. That's where Alison works. I can't see the mountains at all, so they are probably getting hammered. I hope she can make it home today.

13:37 p.m.: The sky has clouded up again, and there is the lightest little bit of snow falling. Pretty much everything that had collected previously has melted. There was a cat in the yard, but he didn't want to be my friend.

13:53 p.m.: The light snow has stopped again, and the sky is once again clearing up fairly quickly.

14:31 p.m.: Extremely light snow, but the sky is clearing up already.

After that, it cleared, darkened, and cleared one more time. What strange weather. This morning it was 8 degrees in the Valles Caldera, and snowing heavily. We will not be making a trip up there this weekend.

Hail yeah!

It just hailed here. Crazy amounts of hail, but it lasted no more than a couple minutes. The hail never got more than pea sized. But have I ever mentioned that I just love hail? Hail. There's something that seems vaguely unnatural about little spheres of ice falling from the sky.
The only thing I don't like about the hail is that it brings up many trepidations here in Socorro, due to this event.