Yesterday, I left my coat at home and went for a brisk walk downtown, which left me sweating. It felt like a nice warm spring.
Tomorrow, all the students will be returning from spring break, all tanned and rested and ready to work.
So what happens today? I was awakened to the sound of sleet and wind rattling the windows, and went to look out and see what’s going on. This is what I saw.
The windows are all glazed with ice. There is a nice foundation layer of ice on the ground, with snow coming down on top of that, wind blowing it everywhere. We’ve got weather warnings about whiteout conditions.
Drive safe, students! I guess I’ll have to prepare my planned lecture so I can deliver it over zoom. It’s not as if I’m going anywhere today, I’m just going to hunker down and work from home anyway.
PZ, please be careful. After all we are all skating on thin ice!
https://www.thedailybeast.com/dem-civil-war-erupts-over-government-shutdown-as-aoc-and-chuck-schumer-go-at-it/
I stand with AOC. schumer can crawl off and die!
I don’t know how our Pacific coast weather is related to your weather (from what I’ve seen that can vary) but our weather has been through similar cycles though a week or so earlier. We’ve had several “false springs” followed by more cold and rain. That’s what we have now, have had for over a week, and for coming next week, but two weeks ago it was balmy here in California.
With the jet stream being weaker there are plenty of instances of cold air lealing south. In north Sweden we had two weeks of melting snow, abruptly cut off by cold.
Lealing = should be ‘leaking’.
I remember when I realized that this kind of thing happens every Winter/Spring and that it would continue happening until I moved South.
7° North seemed about far enough. And yep, it was!
@ ^ Chris Whitehouse : Global Overheating is going to change and keep changing the familiar climate zones though.
Sure I’ve mentioned before but here in the Adelaide hills, South Oz (35 degrees South) we’re currently enduring a severe drought with water levels lower than I;ve ever seen and Ive been living here many decades now. It hasn’t rained for months and we had much less rain than usual last year – virtually none anbd about 80-90 days without precipitation last Autumn. Now we’re ehading towards Autumn again but have been abpout a hundred days without rainfaill and with extreme heat. It reached 42 degrees Celsius (107.6 Fahrenheit) in Adelaide yesterday. Today, thankfully is much cooler but even the tough bushland vegetation is really struggling now with a lot of the trees and shrubs sick, dying or badly stressed. It is fucking grim.
Oh, that sounds lovely. It was 84F here yesterday (average high for this time of year is 57F), with high humidity and high winds. And you know what that means: a metric fuckton of tornadoes!
Every tornado siren in the city went off at midnight. Usually, only the sirens closest to the danger area go off but last night there were so many tornadoes that they just set them all off as the line rolled over us. There was confirmation of five tornadoes, in fact, on the ground at the time the forward edge of the line reached our town, two of which were aimed right at us.
We got very lucky; the tornadoes all blew themselves out within a dozen miles of the city limits. Given that the storms were moving at 70MPH at the time, I think it’s fair to say that it was a rather close call. Even without the tornadoes, we had a fair amount of damage around the city from straight-line winds. The highest officially recorded gust was 77MPH out at the airport, but I very much doubt that that was the strongest burst we got.
I got very little sleep, even after the storms passed. It was in the mid-80s in the house, and I couldn’t risk opening the windows with the residual wind and rain. Miserable and rotten, is the coming of spring.
I’d give ‘most anything for the sweet sound of sleet clinking against the windowpanes.
StevoR @ 6
Another good thing with ‘down under’.
Rural gothic written by the author Garry Discher: cops without a hint of Mad Max.
I just finished reading “Peace”. It reminded me strongly of wossname who write stories about a cop in Louisiana.
Not snowfall, but kids who use every chemical ever invented on top of alcohol, rednecks who take every opportunity to start a brawl, old journals with descriptions of how shooting the savages was the only way to interact with the “former owners”.
This is so silly, but it is a break from focusing on the death spiral, PZ, as well as others, should enjoy it
https://www.gocomics.com/shermanslagoon/2025/03/15
UK weather: temperatures in southern England could hit 19C this week. https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/16/uk-weather-warmer-temperatures-southern-england-spring-equinox
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/16/uk-weather-warmer-temperatures-southern-england-spring-equinox
We just had a downpour here that reminded more of a summer storm than a typical spring one, complete with “waves” of thicker rain zipping by and significant winds. It was also in the low double digits. In March. Normal is hovering around zero this time of year.