Thursday, March 27, 2008

Wild and Crazy Spring Weather


On Tuesday evening, when I was in Bandon, it was beautiful, almost 60-degree weather. Then a squall came in overnight. Wednesday morning, before I left Bandon, I witnessed a thunderstorm - saw a lightning strike and I was only able to count to "1" when I heard the crack of thunder. Then, it downpoured, then I had a few minutes of hail. When I went to say goodbye to my friends in their room, the winds increased for about 15 minutes. We could see the wind blowing the water on top of the sand and it was creating long streaks.

When I got home, my folks said that it had snowed here in the valley - big large snow flakes. I guess it snowed in the foothills of Portland, too. This morning, when Eddie and I looked out the window, we saw snow on the bench outside our front door. I took this picture - it shows my daffodils in the back, the lilac has buds, and then the snow on the bench. Wild weather - can't make up its mind!

3 comments:

escape said...

wild weather indeed. i remember my brother when he stayed there for a year. he works with Intel.

Carver said...

The weather has been so strange everywhere. It's supposed to get up to 80 here and it was in the 30s just a few nights ago. It snowed where my daughter lives too and I know the north east and parts of the west keeps getting slammed.

It's not impossible for us to get a March snow although very rare. I would almost welcome it except the trees and flowers here are about a month ahead of schedule. I've checked photographs from last year and we are literally one month farther a long than last year and last year was an early spring too. The problem is our last frost date isn't until mid April and last year it got into the 20s one night at the end of April and did a lot of damage in terms of fruit trees.

I'm a little obsessive talking about it as I know I've mentioned this on my blog but I feel like I'm holding my breath for us to be in the clear. At the same time I'm not eager for summer so if it weren't for the damage to farmers (orchards in particular), I wouldn't mind some more winter. I know it's different thought for the midwest, northeast, and northwest and other areas that have had a very hard winter.

Dee said...

That's the problem with global warming and climate change, Carver. It does make weather more unpredictable. So, as I explained to a friend of mine recently, while this winter was worse in a lot of areas, it's a blip on the graph. Climatologists work with data stretching back thousands of years - I remember a graph that Al Gore showed in "An Inconvenient Truth" that showed how the temperature fluctuated from both a temperature maximum and minimum - the cycle was either every 40,000 years or every 400,000 years. And, while the climate fluctuates quite a bit on a year to year basis, the overall trend is upward right now even though this year is slightly colder in some areas. There was a news report this week about how a very large ice shelf broke off of Antarctica, making one of the larger ice sheets more vulnerable to breaking off . . . this is the ice sheet that scientists are very worried about because it will cause sea level rise.

Our winters here are usually cool and rainy and cloudy. I, for one, am looking forward to more sun and warmth!!