Winter's Punch and Spring's Signs

It's been an interesting past couple of months as we've transitioned in fits and starts from winter to spring.  There is no doubt that for much of the United States, this winter has certainly packed quite a punch, especially once January came around.  The punch continued throughout February, and is still being felt even as we start Marching out of this month, while signs of spring have been abounding slowly but surely.

The first sign of spring I experienced was not in the Chicago area, but in Atlanta, when I was there at the beginning of February for the AMS meeting.  Remember, they had just had a major winter storm with snow and ice that shut down their Metro area a few days before I was there in the closing days of January.  Being there was like experiencing spring coming alive after winter.  On the evening of February 2, I found myself in 70-degree temperatures.  Just 3 days later, back in Chicagoland, I was out shoveling snow around my family's house property.

The next week, the South got hit again with yet another major winter storm.  Two different weather systems moved through the area between February 11-13.  Cold air rushed in, and so did air with lots of moisture.  There were significant snow accumulations to areas closer to the Appalachians.  While areas closer to the Atlantic Ocean, like central South Carolina, received significant ice accumulation, being in a transition zone where the temperatures in a layer from cloud base to the ground allowed for rain to fall, which froze on surfaces with below freezing temperatures.  Atlanta was ready to do it right this time around, but that wasn't so much the case in Charlotte, NC.

The one thing that really stuck out to me was when I went to the NWS website, and noticed ALL of the South Carolina was blanketed by a State of Emergency, with a Civil Emergency Message urging people to limit all travel because the ice accumulation would be significant enough to render going anywhere hazardous.  You can read a summary of this event on this page on the website of the National Weather Service's Weather Forecast Office in Columbia, SC: http://www.erh.noaa.gov/cae/Events/Feb2014SnowIceStorm/SnowIceEvent.php

The week after that, on Presidents' Day, there was quite a snow event in the Chicago area.  While coming home from work, I caught this incredible image of a CTA train pulling east out of the Oak Park Blue Line station:

A couple of days later, I woke up and saw lightning and heard thunder--that's something that certainly makes us think of spring's advent.  A weather system moved toward the area, with moisture-laden air.  Some areas further north in Illinois received wet snow, but rain everywhere else in the Chicagoland area.  The air was so moist that there was thick fog in place Thursday evening.  Further south in Illinois, there were severe thunderstorms.  You can read more about this event on this page on the National Weather Service Chicago(land) Forecast Office website: http://www.crh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=lot&storyid=97146&source=2

The notable thing about these weather systems was that moisture was drawn into them from the Gulf of Mexico.  Before this, all the snow events we experienced in Chicagoland were due to Albert Clippers, low pressure systems that dive southeast out of Canada toward the Great Lakes/Midwest region.  These Alberta Clippers lacked lots of moisture, so we got lots of white, powdery snow.  But the weather systems during this week in February involved lots more moisture, which meant heavy, wet snow, like the "heart-attack" kind of snow.

On back to back Wednesdays in March, the 5th and 12th, there were snows in the Chicago area during the morning hours.

Even in the morning of March 20, hours before the Vernal Equinox at 11:57 AM CDT, or 1657 Z/UTC, if you prefer, there was snow.  But that soon gave way to sunny skies, and another sign of spring: maple tree tapping and maple syrup making.  In Cummings Square in River Forest, just a stone's throw away from where I work, there was a Taste of Maple Syrup Festival.  They showed the process of tapping the trees, and then boiling the sap down into sugar, a laborious process to get the very watery sap into a substance with a precise 66% concentration of sugar.

Above is the maple sap being boiled, and below is a close-up of the sap's boiling.  This boiling apparently can take 8-10 hours to get it to the right concentration of sugar.

 

Sap filling these 40 gallon containers become one gallon of syrup

The winter has flexed its muscle well into March, going even into the last full week, with cold temperatures , and snowfall in the early morning hours of the 25th, and some flakes mixed in with rain on the morning of the 27th.  While these conditions are possible in this part of the world at this time of year, these kinds of conditions are undoubtedly wintry.

But the persistent cold did not prevent an annual Chicago tradition: the dyeing of the Chicago River green.

And yes, an orange-colored powder is poured into river to make it that lovely shade of green.

Indeed, this transition is occurring slowly but surely.  But I say that the sun will soon works its magic.  The sun angle is already increasing, accompanied by longer amounts of daylight.  That means more solar radiation, translating into warmer temperatures, and the spring and summer weather we delight in.  So as long as there's no cataclysmic event like a major volcanic eruption that throws particles high into the atmosphere to block out the sun's light, we will soon experience the progression of the natural cycle into warmer weather, even as we already see signs of it.