Weather Is Crazier Than Normal In Indiana This Year
Posted
Gary Gerard-ggerard@timesuniononline.com
There's an old saying that, "If you don't like the weather in Indiana, stay a day."
That, of course, is to say that the weather here is fairly unpredictable and changes frequently.
The past couple of months has lent that old saying new meaning.
I am an Indiana lifer.
I grew up in Plymouth, attended ISU in Terre Haute for four years, worked in Logansport for seven years and in Warsaw for 20 years.
I can honestly say I have no memory of such bizarre winter weather.
A couple of weeks ago, I was grilling chicken breasts out on the deck in my shirt sleeves. It was a bit windy, but it was 52 degrees, according to the thermometer on the front of the house.
I heard thunder off in the distance and could see lightning flashing.
Approximately 10 hours later, my feet hit the floor in my bedroom on a Wednesday morning. I looked up at the ceiling to check the time and temperature.
(The time and temp is projected there by the little weather station my son bought my wife and I for Christmas a couple years ago. It has a remote temperature sensor outside. The time and temperature is displayed on the unit itself, but it also has this little tubular device that projects the time and temp wherever you aim it, like on a wall or on the ceiling, so you can see it at night. Very cool.)
Anyway, much to my dismay, the temperature was 1 degree, fully 51 degrees colder than it was just hours before when I was grilling chicken on the deck in my shirt sleeves.
Oh, yeah, and by the way, the wind was howling. The weather lady on the South Bend TV station said the wind chill was minus 20.
The thermometer on the front of the house confirmed the bad news - 1 degree.
Now, I'm really not one to complain about the weather, but that's a 72 degree swing in "feels like" temperature in a matter of hours. That's just ridiculous.
I don't mind cold. I enjoy things like ice fishing and snowboarding. I am a bit of a winter activity kind of person.
But this winter, the weather is crazy. You can't plan on anything. The weather is all over the map.
We get a foot of snow, temps in the single digits and 30 mph winds. Then, a few days later, we get temps in the 50s. The snow melts, it rains a couple inches and everything floods.
I have friends who have had to deal with a basement full of water twice this winter. They've had problems before, but not like this - ever. And they've lived in that house for a long time.
But given what people in other parts of the country have had to endure, we probably should be thankful all we have is floods.
At least we don't have thousands of homes destroyed by wildfires or dozens of people killed by rare February tornadoes.
Of course, it was a miracle no one was seriously injured in Nappanee when tornadoes ravaged that town in October.
I guess this is what meteorologists mean when they talk about "climate change."
Because the climate is a lot different today than it was in the 1960s when I was a kid growing up in Plymouth.
Seemed to me there were some pretty clearly defined seasons back then.
You could expect snow on the ground by Thanksgiving and ice on the lake by Christmas. Save for the occasional "January thaw," you could count on not seeing the ground until March.
But even in the dead of winter I remember crisp days with high, blue skies. It was cold, but it was clear.
These days, winter is a strange rollercoaster of wet snow, rain, icy mix and general gray blahs for about six months from October to April. It is punctuated occasionally with a big dump of snow.
So I can see climate change happening right before my eyes. Seems to me the weather, while cyclical, will continue to get weirder and weirder as the years go by - more floods, more droughts, more extremes.
There's a fascinating article in The Guardian, a big U.K. newspaper, by science correspondent Ian Sample. You can check it out here:
The headline is "Global meltdown: Scientists isolate areas most at risk of climate change."
It has subheads like, "Exp-erts assess point at which it is too late to act" and "Disastrous repercussions of warming are spelled out."
The scientists say climate change eventually will bring food and water shortages to vulnerable parts of the world, displace millions of people and wipe out hundreds of species.
They say a lot of the stuff they're talking won't happen until the turn of the century and beyond, but they do have some predictions over the next 25 years.
They say, for example, that El Niño, the climate system which greatly impacts weather from Africa to North America, will become more intense.
If they're right, that means more weather extremes for us.
And it seems these days there is a general consensus among the scientific world that they are right.
Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure: There is some really whacky weather in Indiana these days - and the rest of the U.S. for that matter.There's an old saying that, "If you don't like the weather in Indiana, stay a day."
That, of course, is to say that the weather here is fairly unpredictable and changes frequently.
The past couple of months has lent that old saying new meaning.
I am an Indiana lifer.
I grew up in Plymouth, attended ISU in Terre Haute for four years, worked in Logansport for seven years and in Warsaw for 20 years.
I can honestly say I have no memory of such bizarre winter weather.
A couple of weeks ago, I was grilling chicken breasts out on the deck in my shirt sleeves. It was a bit windy, but it was 52 degrees, according to the thermometer on the front of the house.
I heard thunder off in the distance and could see lightning flashing.
Approximately 10 hours later, my feet hit the floor in my bedroom on a Wednesday morning. I looked up at the ceiling to check the time and temperature.
(The time and temp is projected there by the little weather station my son bought my wife and I for Christmas a couple years ago. It has a remote temperature sensor outside. The time and temperature is displayed on the unit itself, but it also has this little tubular device that projects the time and temp wherever you aim it, like on a wall or on the ceiling, so you can see it at night. Very cool.)
Anyway, much to my dismay, the temperature was 1 degree, fully 51 degrees colder than it was just hours before when I was grilling chicken on the deck in my shirt sleeves.
Oh, yeah, and by the way, the wind was howling. The weather lady on the South Bend TV station said the wind chill was minus 20.
The thermometer on the front of the house confirmed the bad news - 1 degree.
Now, I'm really not one to complain about the weather, but that's a 72 degree swing in "feels like" temperature in a matter of hours. That's just ridiculous.
I don't mind cold. I enjoy things like ice fishing and snowboarding. I am a bit of a winter activity kind of person.
But this winter, the weather is crazy. You can't plan on anything. The weather is all over the map.
We get a foot of snow, temps in the single digits and 30 mph winds. Then, a few days later, we get temps in the 50s. The snow melts, it rains a couple inches and everything floods.
I have friends who have had to deal with a basement full of water twice this winter. They've had problems before, but not like this - ever. And they've lived in that house for a long time.
But given what people in other parts of the country have had to endure, we probably should be thankful all we have is floods.
At least we don't have thousands of homes destroyed by wildfires or dozens of people killed by rare February tornadoes.
Of course, it was a miracle no one was seriously injured in Nappanee when tornadoes ravaged that town in October.
I guess this is what meteorologists mean when they talk about "climate change."
Because the climate is a lot different today than it was in the 1960s when I was a kid growing up in Plymouth.
Seemed to me there were some pretty clearly defined seasons back then.
You could expect snow on the ground by Thanksgiving and ice on the lake by Christmas. Save for the occasional "January thaw," you could count on not seeing the ground until March.
But even in the dead of winter I remember crisp days with high, blue skies. It was cold, but it was clear.
These days, winter is a strange rollercoaster of wet snow, rain, icy mix and general gray blahs for about six months from October to April. It is punctuated occasionally with a big dump of snow.
So I can see climate change happening right before my eyes. Seems to me the weather, while cyclical, will continue to get weirder and weirder as the years go by - more floods, more droughts, more extremes.
There's a fascinating article in The Guardian, a big U.K. newspaper, by science correspondent Ian Sample. You can check it out here:
The headline is "Global meltdown: Scientists isolate areas most at risk of climate change."
It has subheads like, "Exp-erts assess point at which it is too late to act" and "Disastrous repercussions of warming are spelled out."
The scientists say climate change eventually will bring food and water shortages to vulnerable parts of the world, displace millions of people and wipe out hundreds of species.
They say a lot of the stuff they're talking won't happen until the turn of the century and beyond, but they do have some predictions over the next 25 years.
They say, for example, that El Niño, the climate system which greatly impacts weather from Africa to North America, will become more intense.
If they're right, that means more weather extremes for us.
And it seems these days there is a general consensus among the scientific world that they are right.
Only time will tell, but one thing is for sure: There is some really whacky weather in Indiana these days - and the rest of the U.S. for that matter.
