The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

More blizzard videos

The snow keeps coming down here by the lake, but it's officially stopped at O'Hare. We've now had the third biggest snowfall in Chicago history: 513 mm fell over the past two days, only 70 mm short of the 1967 record.

Lest you think we're wimps here, Oak Park River Forest High School closed today for only the 5th time in its 125-year history; the last time was in 1979.

As you read this from San Francisco, or Riyadh, or Singapore, or anywhere else in the world other than the central U.S., feel the disappointment of not having the opportunity to ride this bus today:

It's not horrible. Yet. The wind has calmed from its peak 82 km/h last night, and the temperature still hovers only a little below freezing, at -7°C at O'Hare and -3°C at IDTWHQ. And I'm assured it's wonderful for dogs:

As I write this, Police Superintendent Jody Weis is on the radio talking about (a) the additional snow (possibly 15 cm) expected to hit near the lake, and the -17°C cold expected tonight; and (b) the Lake Shore Drive disaster that stranded hundreds of cars for five hours or longer. "We're aware of no injuries, but hundreds of people were very inconvenienced last night."

It's groundhog day...again...

First, a report out of Punxsutawney, Penn., that Punxsutawney Phil (the groundhog) did not see his shadow:

Punxsutawney Phil emerged from a tree stump at dawn and, unusually, did not see his shadow, signaling that spring is just around the corner, according to tradition.

"He found that there was no shadow," said Bill Deeley, president of a club that organizes Groundhog Day in the western Pennsylvania town of Punxsutawney. "So an early spring it will be."

Ah, but there's a catch:

"There is no question that Phil is capable of feeling empathy," Johnston said in an interview. "But he is absolutely incapable of error."

The rodent's predictions are "not burdened by being site-specific" and so can be sure to predict an early spring in some part of the world, Johnston added.

Who knew Phil was a lawyer? Also—wasn't there, you know, a blizzard last night?

While western Pennsylvania was spared the worst of the storm, many central and northern areas of the U.S. were hit by snow and ice that closed roads, shut down businesses, and grounded flights.

But the Punxsutawney crowd, which started arriving on Gobbler's Knob at 3 a.m., braved some of the worst weather in the last 20 years of Groundhog Day, said [Mike Johnston, vice president of the Punxsutawney Groundhog Club's Inner Circle, or board of directors].

Looking outside at the weather in Chicago, I hope Phil was thinking of the north-central U.S....

Update: The Tribune has video, and allows sharing, so:

 

Once-in-a-lifetime snow?

The weather we've worried about for a couple of days looks set to hit this afternoon:

Four days of computer forecasts of this storm, including multiple runs off 7 models, are putting the developing system on a more northerly track while generating water equivalent precipitation of around 30 mm. To convert that to snow, calculations have to be made of how snowflakes are likely to develop in the storm given a snow/water ratio predicted to be 15 to 1 Tuesday evening. [This means 450 mm of snow. —ed.]

As expected, Lake Michigan may contribute an additional 75 to 175 mm to the system in lakeside counties

The National Weather Service warns:

A BLIZZARD WARNING REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 3 PM THIS AFTERNOON TO
3 PM CST WEDNESDAY.

* TIMING...ACCUMULATING SNOW WILL DEVELOP AROUND THE INTERSTATE 80
  CORRIDOR DURING THE EARLY TO MID AFTERNOON...SPREADING NORTH TO
  THE WISCONSIN STATE LINE BY MID TO LATE AFTERNOON. THE MOST
  SIGNIFICANT SNOW MAY COME IN A COUPLE OF WAVES...WITH THE FIRST
  WAVE LATE THIS AFTERNOON INTO EARLY THIS EVENING...FOLLOWED BY A
  SECOND WAVE OF INTENSE SNOW LATER THIS EVENING INTO THE
  OVERNIGHT. ACCUMULATING LAKE EFFECT SNOW SHOWERS WILL CONTINUE
  OVER NORTHEAST ILLINOIS WEDNESDAY MORNING...SPREADING INTO
  NORTHWEST INDIANA WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON.

* ACCUMULATIONS...SNOW WILL BE HEAVY AT TIMES WITH ACCUMULATION
  RATES OF 1 TO 2 INCHES PER HOUR LIKELY. STORM TOTAL SNOWFALL OF
  10 TO 18 INCHES IS LIKELY TOWARD ROCKFORD AND DIXON. THE
  HEAVIEST SNOWFALL TOTALS ARE LIKELY DOWNWIND OF LAKE MICHIGAN IN
  THE CHICAGO METROPOLITAN AREA INTO NORTHWEST INDIANA WHERE 12 TO
  20 INCHES OF SNOW IS LIKELY...WITH ISOLATED AMOUNTS OF AROUND 2
  FEET POSSIBLE.

* WINDS...NORTHEAST WINDS WILL INCREASE TO 20 TO 35 MPH BY LATE
  THIS AFTERNOON. WIND GUSTS UP TO 40 MPH WILL BE POSSIBLE BY
  EVENING WITH GUSTS OF 40 TO 50 MPH LIKELY TONIGHT. EVEN STRONGER
  WINDS ARE LIKELY NEAR THE IMMEDIATE LAKESHORE WITH SUSTAINED
  WINDS OF 30 TO 40 MPH WITH GUSTS BETWEEN 50 AND 60 MPH.

The Daily Parker will have updates and photos as conditions warrant.

Oh, almost forgot about the weather

We're likely to begin February with the biggest snowfall in Chicago's recorded history:

A Blizzard Watch is in effect Tuesday afternoon through Wednesday as a strengthening low pressure system moves up the Ohio Valley. Late Tuesday afternoon steady snow and stronger winds will push into the region, starting south of I-80 and spreading north during the evening.

Snowfall rates Tuesday night could approach 50 to 80 mm per hour and when combined with sustained winds at 50-60 km/h, visibilities are will drop significantly with near whiteout conditions possible.

Snow totals of 30 to 50 cm are possible between Monday night and Wednesday afternoon with locally higher amounts. Drifting and blowing snow will make travel dangerous and possibly life threatening Tuesday night.

Lakeshore flooding is also a possibility. Waves of 3 to 5 m will crash along the Illinois side of the Lake Michigan shoreline.

Oh. Joy.

Time for a new W-4

Every year, I surprise myself by the amount of money I loan the United States, interest-free. Today I found out it's about double what I estimated earlier. This isn't a good thing: while I have no objection to paying taxes, I object strongly to over-paying during the tax year, even if they do refund it a week after I ask for it.

</ rant>

Cold, but not too cold

This winter Chicago has had below-average temperatures overall but nothing really cold. It's like a study in moderation, only unusual when you see the numbers rather than when you experience it:

Just one day this season has produced a sub-minus-17 Celsius low temperature and only one day has failed to climb out of single digits. Since the start of the three month (December through February) meteorological winter period, 38 of the 59 days—64% of them—have generated below normal readings.

It's a fact that except for New Year's Day, not a single day has produced a high over 4°C. And, the month of January has hosted only three days with highs above freezing—a fraction of the 141-year average of 14 above-freezing days to date. That's the fewest above-freezing days to occur in a January here in the 34 years since 1977.

Temperatures Saturday may poke above freezing long enough to turn the snow which has covered the ground here for 19 consecutive days a bit slushy. But a thaw capable of melting snow currently on the ground isn't in sight as we approach February 2011's arrival Tuesday, nor is a thaw expected in the week which follows.

The official temperature right now is 1°C, the warmest we expect it to be for at least the next week.

Yo! I got your "let it snow" right here, bub!

New York City has had its 6th and 8th biggest snowstorms of all time this winter, and it's a week away from another one:

Here is the complete list of the top-ten biggest snows there from Dr. Jeff Masters' Wunderblog:

1) 26.9" Feb 11-12, 2006
2) 26.4" Dec 26-27, 1947
3) 21.0" Mar 12-14, 1888
4) 20.8" Feb 25-26, 2010
5) 20.2" Jan 7-8, 1996
6) 20.0" Dec 26-27, 2010
7) 19.8" Feb 16-17, 2003
8) 19.0" Jan 26-27, 2011
9) 18.1" Mar 7-8, 1941
10) 17.7" Feb 5-7, 1978

I remember the one in February 2003: it stranded me in Washington for two days. At the Hyatt. Which, you know, really wasn't horrible, all things considering.

I digress.

The Canadian weather bureau forecasts another winter storm to dip around the Great Lakes and hit Chicago on Tuesday; however, all the other models in the world project the storm slinking much farther East and hitting Atlanta, Raleigh, DC, New York, and Boston.

By the way, one of the major predictions of anthropomorphic climate change theory is that the North American storm track will shift south. It used to go pretty much straight across Illinois during the winter and across Wisconsin in the summer. Now we're seeing the track generally around Nashville in the winter and St. Louis in the summer. That means, a warmer climate overall will cause more precipitation in the Southeast and Northeast during the winter, and more in the Central Plains during the summer. It also means generally milder weather around the Great Lakes.

New York Times editor on Wikileaks

Via Conor Friedersdorf, New York Times Executive Editor Bill Keller has a detailed essay about how and why the Times published the last Wikileaks dump. He concludes

Although it is our aim to be impartial in our presentation of the news, our attitude toward these issues is far from indifferent. The journalists at The Times have a large and personal stake in the country’s security. We live and work in a city that has been tragically marked as a favorite terrorist target, and in the wake of 9/11 our journalists plunged into the ruins to tell the story of what happened here. Moreover, The Times has nine staff correspondents assigned to the two wars still being waged in the wake of that attack, plus a rotating cast of photographers, visiting writers and scores of local stringers and support staff. They work in this high-risk environment because, while there are many places you can go for opinions about the war, there are few places — and fewer by the day — where you can go to find honest, on-the-scene reporting about what is happening. We take extraordinary precautions to keep them safe, but we have had two of our Iraqi journalists murdered for doing their jobs. We have had four journalists held hostage by the Taliban — two of them for seven months. We had one Afghan journalist killed in a rescue attempt. Last October, while I was in Kabul, we got word that a photographer embedded for us with troops near Kandahar stepped on an improvised mine and lost both his legs.

We are invested in the struggle against murderous extremism in another sense. The virulent hatred espoused by terrorists, judging by their literature, is directed not just against our people and our buildings but also at our values and at our faith in the self-government of an informed electorate. If the freedom of the press makes some Americans uneasy, it is anathema to the ideologists of terror.

I'm with Friedersdorf; I think this gets it right. He says:

This description – and it seems fair and accurate to me – puts the Times in a much different light than is cast by some of its critics, who'd have us believe that the newspaper, which in many ways is establishmentarian (to a fault on occassion), is actually a trangressive, post-national entity with a knee-jerk tenency to blame America first.

I submit that in the matter of Wikileaks, the American people were a lot better off for the involvement of The New York Times than we would've been had the documents been dumped on the Internet without the newspaper's involvement – and that, even if you disagree with some of the decisons they made, which is reasonable enough, their approach to this matter was cogent and defensible.

Both the article and Friedersdorf's analysis are worth reading.