Steller’s jays sunbathing (photo by Michelline Halliday)
It looks like these Steller’s jays are overcome by the heat but they’re actually sunbathing on Michelline Halliday’s roof in Seattle.
Today is the wrong day to sunbathe in Pittsburgh! The high will be 94oF but the heat index will make it feel like 102o. Last night at 9:00pm it was still 89o with a heat index of 97o. This morning it was 80oF at dawn. And did I mention that the air will be bad? Stay indoors.
Today it will be only 69oF in Seattle. (I’m so jealous!)
Even so, it looks like one jay is saying to the other, “Hot enough for you?”
On July 1 NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center released the new U.S. Climate Normals based on 1981-2010 data.
“Normals” are a 30-year average of daily and monthly temperatures, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, and heating and cooling degree days. We hear them every day when the weather forecast is compared to normal and they’re used to forecast energy loads, crop planting times and construction schedules, to name a few.
Every ten years NOAA recalculates the normals using an international protocol that drops the oldest decade and incorporates the most recent. On July 1, the 1970s were dropped and the 2000s included.
The result shows that the average U.S. temperature increased half a degree. 2001-2010 was the hottest decade on record — 1.5oF hotter than the 1970s — but the normals are a three-decade average so it comes to 0.5oF. Surprisingly, most of the temperature gain was through warmer nights, not hotter days. January minimum temperatures rose 5 degrees in the most northern U.S. states.
Does that half a degree matter?
Indeed it does. Warmer nights mean that killing frosts start later in the fall and end earlier in the spring. Wherever you live, the growing season is a little bit longer.
You can see this on the NOAA map above where each colored stripe represents the change in a plant hardiness zone. Pittsburgh is squarely inside Zone 6 so we aren’t in a colored stripe — yet — but northwestern Pennsylvania and the Allegheny Plateau have warmed enough to move from Zone 5 into 6. Michigan changed a lot!
You might think this is great news but there are bad side effects. If you rely on plants at the southern edge of their range, those plants are stressed because it’s too hot for them. Even if you hate winter, you’ve got to admit it’s a great pest control system. Deep freezing nights protect our plants by killing many insect pests. Sadly, pine bark beetles now thrive in Colorado and Canada because their winters are no longer cold enough to kill them.
If you’ve been gardening or farming for the past 30 years you’ve noticed the shift in temperature and you’ll be glad to know that USDA is revising their 1990 Plant Hardiness Map based on the new data.
When the new map comes out, keep it handy — but expect to need a new one in only 10 years. According to NOAA’s Climate Center, plant zones will shift dramatically by 2041. By then Pittsburgh will feel like Tennessee. We’ll be in Zone 7.
Hot, sunny weather today and tomorrow will cook up a nasty brew of ground-level ozone in the Pittsburgh area. PA DEP has cautioned that both days will be at the orange level: unhealthy for sensitive groups.
Ozone (O3) is an unstable gas that’s bad at ground level because it’s toxic but good in the stratosphere because it protects us from ultraviolet light. It’s formed when UV light acts on oxygen (O2) and other constituents to create the three-atom structure shown above.
If you have breathing problems, stay indoors.
Funny how the chemical structure of ozone looks like it’s saying “Oh No!”
Today is the spring equinox when the sun’s rays directly strike the Equator and day’s length is the same as night’s.
On Friday the warm weather felt like May, but the woods are still brown. At this time of year even the faintest sign of flowers is enough to get me excited. Here’s a list of hopeful signs I’ve seen since my last phenology report only five days ago.
Robins singing before dawn.
Canada geese flying over my house in the city.
A northern flicker drumming on the metal floodlight hoods at Magee ballfield. (He’s really loud!)
Swelling buds make the trees look denser. The red maples look hazy-red. Some trees already have tiny flowers.
New leaves on bush honeysuckle, an invasive plant that’s always first to leaf out.
Red-tailed hawks mating.
My daffodils and tulips are pushing up through the leaf litter. Today I’ll be looking for coltsfoot in bloom.
It rained again last night. And yesterday. And last week.
This year’s rainfall is already 4.38″ above normal; 67% more than we usually get. All the excess rain fell since February 1.
This has caused flooding, though nothing extraordinary for Pittsburgh in the spring, and a less publicized problem called combined sewer overflow.
Prior to the 1940’s the older towns in Allegheny County built their sewage collection systems to do two things at once: carry rainwater off the streets (storm sewers) and collect sewage (sanitary sewers). It was cheap to build combined sewers because they only require one pipe. There was no law against building new systems this way until the 1940’s when we could no longer tolerate the problem it caused.
The problem is that when it rains too much the sewage treatment plants cannot handle the inflow of rain+sewage so the excess goes directly into the river. As little as 1/4-inch of rain can cause a combined sewer overflow in Allegheny County.
Fixing this problem will cost billions of dollars, but fix it we must. Allegheny County is under a consent decree that requires us to finalize a plan by 2012 and fix the problem by 2026. (It’s about time we did! Click here for a very interesting history of river use and water treatment in the Pittsburgh area.)
Meanwhile there’s something each of us in Allegheny County can do to prevent rainwater from overflowing the sewers. Last year the county changed the plumbing laws so that we’re allowed to unhook our downspouts from the sewer system and install rain barrels or rain gardens to prevent the rain from going down the drain.
You can learn how to do this at a seminar at noon next Wednesday, March 23, at Schenley Park Visitors’ Center called Keep the Rain Out of the Drain. Click here to for more information and to let them know you’d like to attend.
Every little bit helps.
(photo from Wikimedia Commons. Click on the photo to see the original.)
Spring was here, I shed my coat and took a long walk, enjoying the new season, making plans for spring activities. Oh, how happy!
Four days ago the weather forecast said it would be colder today but it didn’t sound bad. Then yesterday morning the weatherman predicted 2″-4″ of snow. By afternoon he’d changed his mind and was calling for 3″-5″ starting at 6:00pm.
Instead the snow started at 4:00pm and fell heavily, snarling rush hour traffic. I didn’t have my snow boots on (it was spring, wasn’t it?) and I didn’t want to walk far, so I waited for the bus that stops 300 feet from my house.
It never came. After 50 minutes I took the bus that stops a half mile from my house. Grrrr!
Our official snow total is 8.4″ at the airport. As you can see, there are 8 inches in my back yard.
I’d have nothing to gripe about if there hadn’t been so much false advertising.
After last weekend’s thaw we’ve returned to the amount of snow we had before it rained — about an inch or two on the ground in Pittsburgh — with another inch+ expected today.
North of I-80 it’s another story. By Wednesday the Pymatuning area already had an inch of fluffy stuff but now they’re expecting 2-4 inches of snow today, 3-5 more inches tonight and an additional 1-3 inches on Sunday.
I was going to go birding at Pymatuning tomorrow but that news changed my mind!
So I’m keeping my feeders filled and hoping for a pretty scene like this one.
Tomorrow will be jam-packed with astronomical events, but you’ll miss the first one if I don’t tell you now.
In the wee hours of tomorrow morning — at 3:15am Eastern Standard Time (EST) on December 21, to be exact — the last full moon of 2010 will reach its fullest. Two minutes later it will turn blood red.
That’s because there will be a full lunar eclipse tonight that will reach totality at 3:17am. The eclipse will start 27 minutes after midnight (00:27am on 12/21) and end at 6:06am EST. When the moon is completely eclipsed it usually turns red. This will be visible across all of North America (where there isn’t cloud cover).
The second event is the winter solstice, the moment when the sun “stands still” at its farthest point south for the year. Though this is far less dramatic you can think of it when it occurs at 6:38pm EST.
So if the sky is clear tonight, go to bed early so you can get up to watch the moon.
Don’t worry. You can afford to lose sleep. Tomorrow will be a very short day. 😉
