Daylight Zombies: My Private War Against Dandelions. And How They Won.

Some people would have gone on a long road trip, but I wanted to finish at least one piece of writing longer than a short story… yet not so long that I might not manage to write finis. I could never write a story quite like this now; the specter of mortality charges the mind irreproducibly. Any reader, then, looking for a sedate and measured read: What sort of research did you do for The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps? When I began the novella, I knew next to nothing about big-cat predation, sub-desert topography, or the practical mechanics of apotheosis.

The Brooklyn main library at Grand Army Plaza was wonderfully helpful on these and other topics. Who was the easiest character to write and why? The hardest and why? Demane was the easiest to write. By nature, he has all the compassion I try to cultivate in myself. Writing him was encouragement for my own best impulses. Captain was the hardest to write. It was hard going there.

Which question about The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps do you wish someone would ask? Ask it and answer it! And are you writing or have you written other works in the same continuity? And the answer to both is yes. I hope that my related, second novella, A Taste of Honey , will appear some time in Give us one or two of your favorite non-spoilery lines from The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps.

But what of the one that lunges, savage and snarling, at every hand no matter whose or how kindly, even the one that feeds? Is that what you say? In the long term, I dearly hope to finally figure out the missing chapters of my first full novel: In the Country of Superwomen. Thank you for joining us at The Qwillery. I pity scientists who have to work for complete jerks, and need to nod and make polite chit-chat with buffoons and bozos. It must be downright relieving to get away from such work-conditions, and only need to deal with pound polar bears, and grinding, crushing ice, and howling gales with 50 mph winds and air temperatures of thirty below.

Amazingly, despite all they have to suffer through, they are gathering some data we have never had before. Just check out this wonderful buoy they are now deploying:. Click this image to enlarge it. What is wonderful about these buoys is the yo-yo thermometer dangling beneath it, which allows us to measure the temperature and salinity at various levels below the ice. The stratification of arctic waters and lack of it is likely crucial to understanding the formation of the sea-ice, and the melting of the sea-ice as well.

In conjunction with the Argo buoys in the North Atlantic, we are entering a whole new era of understanding. It is analogous to back when we were first able to measure the upper atmosphere with weather balloons, and produce upper-atmosphere maps. Sadly, there are only 15 of these yo-yo thermometer buoys when there should be , though it is risky deploying even only one of them , however half a loaf is better than none.

However I prefer to think of myself as a farmer who deduced the existence of the jet stream, and then was thrilled when scientists proved his deductions correct. We are like Balboa, climbing the mountains of Panama and seeing a whole new vista, a whole new ocean, the Pacific, for the first time. The scientists gleaning this data deserve our admiration, respect, and support. They should not have to endure the Bozos and Buffoons they must endure. Once we learn about the differences we will be better able to predict, because we will see the differences as they occur, and be able to ascertain the direction things are heading.

The agenda-driven, political Bozos have invested hugely in the concept Global Warming is causing the icecaps to melt. I wish the icecaps actually were, because another Medieval Warm Period would be kind to humanity, however, in the short term at least, it looks like our recent warm period is ending. Both the long-term shift and the current twitch will lead to an increase in sea-ice, and this is likely to be highly embarrassing to the Bozos. I fear this embarrassment, and other examples of their ineptitude, is liable to provoke public outrage and a backlash.

I am afraid the good scientists will be accused of guilt-by-association. In fact the Bozos may even point at them and blame them for giving the Bozos bad advice. Politicians seldom admit their mistakes, especially when there is a chance of dumping the blame on an innocent scapegoat. Having made that clear, I need to announce that my self-imposed exile from the writing I most love is coming to an end. However writing about sea-ice is only a hobby, which happens because I find the scenery very beautiful, from a distance.

What I really want to write about exposes the ugliness of Bozos from a different angle, as I describe how beautiful Truth is. After all, God is in everyone, they say. The Pole is actually behaving itself for a change. The textbooks always show a Polar Cell Like Hadley and Ferrel Cells with air decending at the Pole, creating high pressure there that flows outwards toward the boundary between the polar easterlies and the sub polar westerlies.

Storms run along this boundary, generally west to east, in the textbooks. For the moment well-behaved and meek lows are politely moving west-to-east around the high, with an interesting low reminding me of summer as it moves along the Canadian coast, and another in northern Scandinavia, and a third over in the Bering Strait. However at the very top of the map is Pacific trouble that is going to derange everything. It looks likely to charge north, move the wrong way along the Siberian coast, and loop up to the Pole around Sunday. The wind was still northeast at daybreak today, and like yesterday the temperature was 37, barely creeping up towards 40 as the morning passed.

However as the afternoon has passed the low scud has started to come from the southeast, and by tomorrow the winds are likely to be south, with temperatures 25 degrees warmer, which will end the state of suspended animation our spring has been stalled in.

A weak low has come along the Canadian coast and is now moving down into Baffin Bay, where a new low is forming in the weakness between the eastern extension of the blocking high pressure and the center of the block over Hudson Bay. The block is falling apart, and the flow from west to east is resuming. The mb maps show a ridge of high pressure crossing the Atlantic into western Europe, as some interesting trough-activity occurs to the east of the ridge. In three days the trough will cut-ff a center briefly, over Italy, and in five days another cut-off center will form over Poland.

The passage of this ridge will finally allow some milder air to move north, in the Atlantic, though even in five days the winds look like they are still from the north in Scandinavia. The low at the top of the map will drop down over the Pole by Sunday, as the high pressure currently over the Pole is squeezed south towards Greenland and then swept across the North Atlantic by the upper air ridge, and will be building in Scandinavia at the start of next week.

The low pressure over Scandinavia will move east along the Siberian coast and then be swung north by the low over the Pole and will do a Fugiwhara dance with it. In May we usually start to see our first pools of above-freezing air invading the Arctic Sea, but currently not even hour sunshine can get it above freezing at the Pole. The sun is still relatively low. Often we see this, up here. By the time the warmth finally gets here the cold front is right on its heels, and what is a two day warm spell in Virginia lasts only two hours in New Hampshire.

It was better than usual, as the teacher was my age and actually knew more than me. Infants spend longer hours at Childcare than their parents do at work. The child learns about even such a fundamental thing at their Childcare. It is cold, wet and grey out, and my wife is under the weather with some sort of stomach-bug. Springtime continues on hold. When it finally comes I expect it to be a mad rush. Actually, once I got the wood stove going, I noted our winds are not from the south.

The smoke drifted off to the southwest, which means the wind has gone back to light airs from the northeast. The cat went out onto the porch and just sat, looking around with a sulky expression of complete disgust. Yesterday even the goats looked depressed, which is unusual when the grass is just getting green after months of being brown or snow-covered. It gradually warmed as the sky brightened, until the warm front pushed through just before noon, and then it abruptly was warm and muggy. I was absurdly overdressed, and soon absurdly hot, considering it was only up around 70 21 Celsius.

However it looks bad if you switch from complaining about it being too cold to complaining about it being too hot in four hours. It sets a bad example for the kids. About the only thing really green and growing is the grass, and I had the wisdom to beat the rush at the repair shop, and will be picking up my beat up, year-old rider mower in the morning. I also have to think about tilling the garden, which is a bit of a swamp after the rain of the past week. My head may soon spin the other way. I like having the DMI maps in rapid succession like this. By scrolling down you can create a sort of animation, if your mind works like mine , and see the progression of events.

Not only will this series become less cluttered, but the DMI maps will better tell the story of the north when there are not a lot of other distractions. This particular series shows the polar low coming up from the Pacific. The last one came up from central Siberia, and the one before that came up from the north Atlantic. It gives you the sense the storm track is swinging around the Pole. Meanwhile the Atlantic continues to be prevented from pouring air northwards. I ought check up on them. The above picture is from April 30, before the weather started to deteriorate.

They are crossing a small pressure ridge. The North Pole Cameras are now showing grayer conditions. The winds are picking up and the ice may be moving as fast as they can walk. Let us hope it moves them towards the Pole and not away. They are nervous because they are apparently following in the footsteps of a large polar bear. Hopefully they wont catch up to it.

This was something that happened a lot last summer, keeping a more ice up there than in recent years. Wrong-way-flow in Fram Strait. Trudy explained to the team and to ExplorersWeb that the big lead is drifting North, as the team is doing as well, with south-southwest winds ahead of an approaching storm. The cracks look small from outer space, but to even see them they have to be pretty wide.

They can open and shut as the wind changes. I caught a mild case of the bug my wife caught, but I had the good sense to wait for the weekend, and not miss any work. A weak clipper has come zooming down from the Canadian prairies and is keeping us cool. The real summer air is south of the front way the heck down by Cuba.

There may still be some ice in june: We need a long and steady southwest wind. Calmer, but grey and relatively featureless. As Larsen and Waters approach the Pole they will have to rely on their GPS, as compasses wobble that far north, and there is no sunlight to get a bearing from. I assume the dark line on the horizon is now clouds, and not open water. Stewart Pid warned us of this, via the comments below this post.

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It has got to be a cold spring if even the snowmen are hitchhiking south, but it looks like the natives are handling the cold spring just fine. They are thawing in Svalbard. In case you missed the past post, here is a map of the storm hitting the Pole as they struggled to put up the North Pole Camera last April They had to spend a whole day just hunkered down in their tents:. These storms can crack the ice up even though it is well below the freezing point of salt water. I am afraid Eric Larsen and Ryan Waters may have skied themselves into an area that is broken up and spreading apart, judging from their last dispatch via satelite telephone: I suppose the thing to hope for is that winds gently shift, and bring the spreading ice back together again.

No crunching pressure ridges, please. And, while prayer might not be politically correct, they could use some. At least the whiteout conditions look like they are relenting. This camera has drifted south, and is roughly miles south of them, toward Fram Strait. It was placed on ice especially chosen because it looked stable and unlikely to crack apart, which is why it looks different from the scene Larsen and Waters are describing.

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Now they have to keep an eye out for polar bears, as they sit back and drift with the ice, awaiting air transport home. This is quite different from Peary, who had to walk all the way back to land. However their exploit remains a feat of amazing stamina and endurance, and amazes me. Now, however, I expect they will feel compelled to do a bit of blathering about Global Warming. To forestall future discussion, I suppose I could drag up pictures of submarines surfacing in open leads at the North Pole in the past, even earlier in the spring.

I could also point out the meridianal pattern has sent three storms up to the Pole in thirty days, and a fourth is upon them even as I speak. It is no wonder the ice is stressed, and full of leads and pressure ridges. Their journey was far more difficult than it would have been in a more quiet and zonal pattern, where the ice would have been nice and flat. They deserve credit for the prowess they displayed, overcoming a tortured icecap, but may earn themselves a debit if they prattle on too much about Global Warming.

I imagine this further crunches and tortures the ice up there. It is still just barely cold enough for open water to be chilled, but the salt water is at roughly We have a ways to go, however, before actual melting starts. Remember these cameras have drifted nearly down to 87 degrees north latitude, and the view is over miles from what Larson and Waters are seeing at the Pole. The first is of setting up camp or resupplying the camp, perhaps as early as March 13, , though I judge the photo to be later due to the angle of the sunshine. The second picture was taken as the ice broke up right under the feet of the scientists at the main base in September.

Amazingly, they simply packed things up and moved 40 miles away and went on with their work. This base was located on the sea ice north of Barrow Alaska. My lying eyes see the ice was solid enough to land planes on in the spring, but cracked up in the fall, which is not that different from how things are now. However, if you are more interested in politics then science, then all Alarmists should focus on the first picture showing how strong the ice was back then, whilst all Skeptics focus on the second picture showing the ice was weak back then, and by no means include both pictures in your blog and be balanced.

Milder air is leaking north over Svalbard. The Canadian and Alaskan coast is warmer than normal as the Siberian coast is colder than normal, and some of that cold air is working back towards Finland on east winds. Camera 2 seems to show a lead to the right, with open water reflecting the light. Camera one may be showing the same crack at a greater distance. You can click these pictures to enlarge them. I think the third just appeared today, as I never saw it there before. They may be just working out the bugs, because the picture in the archives of Camera 3 dated May 8 is dated April 14 on the picture itself, and seems to show the guys setting up the camera back then.

Click maps to enlarge. The whirling mess of occluded fragments of storms persists south of Iceland, though it has kicked an eastern extension into the Baltic. For the most part milder Atlantic air has been prevented from moving north, though some did sneak up the east coast of Greenland and over Svalbard for a bit. Tornson looks likely to move east across the Atlantic to England in three days, as the blocking pattern weakens for at least a while. Some milder Pacific air is being drawn in through Bering Strait and along the coast of Alaska, but it is like there is a lid on the top of the North Atlantic, and no full-fledged invasions of mild air are coming north.

I imagine the cloud-cover associated reflects a lot of the low sunlight, keeping the Pole cold. There are no above freezing temperatures on the Arctic Sea. We have a long way to go to reach the heat of July, when temperatures right on the arctic coastlines can top 70 degrees 21 Celsius. While a new cross-polar-flow is suggested by isobars, from Bering Strait to Fram Strait, it looks like the winds to the north of Fram Strait will be from the west in the short term, blowing sea-ice to the east rather than south into the Strait.

Noon is at the top of the temperature map with midnight at the bottom, and you can notice day has warmed temperatures off the north coast of Alaska, as night cools temperatures off the coast of Norway. As the high pressure block breaks down weak low pressure is forecast to drift north from the Baltic Sea to the Siberian coast east of Finland, and restart the more normal progression of lows from west to east along that coast. The storm track likely will back up across Scandinavia, and eventually Atlantic lows will ripple east to the northwest of Norway on their way to the Siberian coastline.

For a time storms have just been stalling out in the Atlantic, forming a confused soup of occlusions. It has been a real struggle to get any warm Atlantic air up into the North Atlantic or Scandinavia. Ar times it seems mild air over the Black Sea has a better chance of working back to Scandinavia than air from the Azores does. I can never recall a lead forming so close to the North Pole Camera before, especially this early in the season. Last year the lead was in the far distance. Temperatures are well below freezing as this picture is taken.

The buoy has drifted south of 87 degrees latitude, moving south-southeast in the steady 15 mph winds. The sea-ice was so broken-up at the Pole the two adventurers were lucky to find a pan large enough for the pilot to land the Twin Otter on. They are able to travel much lighter than the explorers of a hundred years ago, who had only half-completed their journey when they reached the Pole. After the plane picks them up they cross, in a matter of minutes, the miles it took days to cross as they fought their way north. The leads will absorb more sunshine in the summer, but currently are allowing the water to lose heat to the cold air.

I hope they took some pictures of the ice they flew over. They mentioned no pressure ridges, which I am most curious about. Bernice Notenboom descibes it like this: The last one of today around 6 pm provided us with a real challenge. It was under pressure and just like plate tectonics through friction, ice blocks and rubble will start to move, collide and crumble or pile up. In awe we stood on top of this ridge and watched the other side go by, or was it our side?

This movement is all caused by the strong southwest winds we are experiencing for the last week. In the lead itself emerged a massive ice block that rotated when it came in contact with water. Because there was no snow attached to it it must have come from the deep abyss of the ocean. What a spectacle it was. Now we could see hoe tons of ice ends on top of a ridge.

It was also our only chance to cross to the other side and we have to be very quick to operate on moving ice. We dragged the sleds across first and then we jumped from the moving ice to another shore that was slowly moving. It felt like jumping from a moving train to another. You can access their blog site here, though I warn you it contains a lot of Global Warming political blather: Hartley, who struggle south beside her.

Their first-hand accounts of crossing some of the thickest ice seen in recent years seems to belie the talk of the Pole melting. Adventurers prefer to ski with them and not across them. One interesting thing about their formation is that besides drifting ice it involves drifting salt. Curious, I dipped my index finger into a tiny drift and tasted it, and realized it was salt. When salt water freezes the salt gets extruded. You might think the salt would melt the ice, but below a certain temperature its power to melt is lost. The above picture was taken roughly six hours after the Camera One picture further above.

The lead of open water to the left looks like it either closed, or else froze over and was dusted by snow. Two lows will come out of the Baltic over the next week, sliding along the Russia-Finland border and then rolling east along the Siberian coast. Above freezing temperatures at noontime are oozing in through Bering Strait, and part of a Pacific-to-Atlantic cross-polar-flow.

The drifts are shifting. Obviously it has been windy and well below freezing. Isobars indicate north winds in the North Atlantic. Even the surface water is being shunted south. These are the mildest readings I could find.

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There seems to be a strong breeze of 18 mph from the north. And it did start to do that, hitting somewhere out west and delighting the Global Warming crowd, as in one place it was the earliest it ever hit The next map shows the situation three days later, on May 8. We have had decent weather, with the high sun warming us up nicely in the middle of the day, but then, as soon as the sun got low, temperatures would plummet. It would get up around 70 21 Celsius in the mid afternoon, but be back around 38 3 Celsius by the next dawn. It reminded me of when I lived in the desert at feet.

You needed to have a jacket for the moment the sun dipped below the horizon. The next map is from May 10, and surprise, surprise. The front is still stuck in Pennsylvania. Once again cold air is charging south in the west. It is snowing in Denver. Once again a surge of warm air is rushing north in the middle of the USA. My cynicsm mutters that if any warmth gets up here it will last around three hours.

My contribution was this comment:. A further problem is that there are all sorts of other things that can screw up my measure of how cold or warm it has been. This past winter I noticed the warm sector of storms might pass over in a matter of a few hours, spiking temperatures up with the warm front and crashing them down with the cold front, yet on one occasion, because it happened between ten PM and two AM, it straddled midnight, and therefore a warmth that lasted only 4 hours gave me my high temperatures for two days.

This was particularly obvious last winter because warm-sectors had a hard time budging the cold air over New Hampshire, and when they finally rushed past a cold front usually was right on their heels. When this happened fifteen times during the course of a winter it meant there were fifteen occasions when my back-porch mean temperatures were uplifted, even as the frozen slush on my driveway told me it had stayed cold.

What should I trust? Numbers on a sheet of paper? Or the reality I am amidst? What should I be concerned more about? Or a cold west wind from still-frozen Great Lakes? No one picked up my idea, and instead the discussion remained about how to read a thermometer, but I really have noticed a difference in the trees this spring.

I can never remember them being so slow to bud, and then, when they do bloom, the blooms seem sort of withered and limp. The farm is less than a mile away, and only a hundred feet at most higher than my house, but more exposed to north winds, as my house is tucked into a sheltering hillside and faces southeast. The maples are just blooming at the farm, while the leaves are coming out here. Another odd thing I noticed was that a single top bough of an oak was starting to open its buds at the farm, a hundred feet from a maple that was also just budding.

Usually oaks are two weeks later than maples. On may , there was a freak snowstorm here and down in Massachusetts that I remember well, because, when I went back to my boyhood neighborhood, many of the trees I climbed and built tree-houses in as a boy and therefore was particularly fond of , had lost important branches, and in one case all of its branches. The tree damage was so severe because the leaves were all the way out in Not so this year. This year the spring-chilling-effect is particularly pronounced, as the Great Lakes are so late to thaw, Hudson Bay is still frozen, and there is still snow-cover to our north in Canada.

After guiding two Last Degree expeditions km each , Bengt started skiing the km route from the Geographic North Pole south to Canada on April He has probably done the km planned for, but the drift has reduced that to km instead of getting some to 10 km bonus drift a day. Ebbesen added, after the decision was made yesterday, ironicaly the drift changed and Bengt gained a few miles during the night.

This year continues strong winds pushed the ice in a northeast direction. The past two days Bengt had the worst weather since the start. Yesterday he had to stop early as he was worried if he would be able to get his tent up. Today he stopped to wait for better conditions. Closer to land more bad ice and open water awaits and therefore he wants to play safe and get off the ice.

ExplorersWeb is still waiting for a response from Eric Philips, Bernice Notenboom and Martin Hartley, and their home team about what they have decided. After packing all night in Resolute Bay, they started flying back home to Boulder, Colorado. Did only 2 km today through wicked yet spectacular ice fields and frozen leads that will last 10 km. We are camped in the middle of it now and spend the rest of the day filming pulling sleds in the pressure ridges.

The sky cleared, wind stopped and the sun poked through. We climbed on top of an iceberg and saw for the first time the incredible anarchy of ice blocks all around us. The horizon is filled with blue ice and black reflections of leads. Incredible to see, scary to have to go through. I get the feeling the ice is being blown away from the north coast of Canada.

This would create open areas of water between mountainous pressure ridges, which is what they describe.

Judging from their map, they are still a long way from their goal. They may have problems finding a place for a plane to land, in that jumble of ice, if they get closer to Canada. It is humorous how they portray so much of the Arctic Ocean as ice-free on their map, when it is currently ice-covered. Some other buoys reported above freezing temperatures earlier over there. Here is a map of how Buoy F has been drifting, followed by a rather dull picture of what it is currently viewing.

You can click these pictures to enlarge them, or on some computers you can right-click them and open them to a new tab, which keeps you from losing your spot in my fascinating text. He has flow to and fro over the ice all spring, and knows how smashed and bashed up it is. Also, though no one has said this, there has been more snow than usual, and can snow can hide weaknesses in the ice and make an unsafe floe of ice look safe. In any case, the pilot has drawn the line, and stated he will not land on the ice in June as he has done in the past, and in fact will make his last landing today, on May 12, weather permitting.

They may give us a few more good photographs, as they head south waiting for the weather to improve. They also could likely use the prayers of those so inclined. The best thing these crazy young whippersnappers do is to give us a far clearer picture of the situation up there than the static cameras can do. Of course, Alarmists and Skeptics are perfectly capable of looking at the same picture and arriving at vastly different conclusions, but at least we have these pictures, which brings light to the subject.

It will be continued at: This series of posts has wandered a long ways from its original intent, which was to discuss the view from the North Pole Camera. The wait through winter darkness has been long, but the sun has now risen at the Pole. I resorted to using my own eyes because I became increasingly aware that the media and government were disinterested in the the Truth. Bad things will happen to my homeland, I fear, unless its people demand the Truth, even if it is merely the Truth about a thing as removed from their daily life as the ice at the North Pole. Rather than listening, the government has recently ratcheted up a publicity campaign which seems dedicated more towards misinforming than informing.

Sometimes a small pebble can start a big avalanche. However the strong flow seems likely to swing from aiming down the east coast of Greenland to aiming down the west coast, and then to aiming to Canada once again as the sort of cross-polar-flow we have seen too much of this winter. About the only hope I see is that some of the air crossing the Pole is not bone-chilling air from east Siberia, but apparently is milder air from more southerly Steppes.

It is interesting how the peak of the ice extent has occurred later in the season over the past few years. Largely it involves HTGT ice which is fleeting and matters little, but the simple fact it keeps happening suggests the Arctic Sea is hinting at something. In this particular case it may merely be due to Morphy blowing ice up against the shore of Svalbard and closing up the areas of open water that have persisted to the northeast and north of Svalbard all winter.

Some were wondering about undersea volcanoes. You do not need undersea volcanoes to explain it. What would be more usual is for the Transpolar Drift to bring ice across the Pole and down into Fram Strait, which tends to eventually bring ice against the northwest coast of Svalbard. Also the polar easterlies scoot ice along the ice-edge boundary in Barents Sea against the northeast and east coast of Svalbard. Although these two motions did happen this winter, they were also interrupted by shifting winds that moved ice away from Svalbard.

The most interesting motions defied the Transpolar Flow, and pushed ice towards Canada, building the amounts of ice in the Beaufort Gyre.

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While that does increase ice in that part of the Arctic Ocean, it robs the area around Svalbard of its usual quota of imported ice. Most of the ice pressing towards Svalbard this winter did not come from the Transpolar Drift, but from the Barents Sea, robbing that area of ice and resulting in a lot more open water. IE since , and ignoring historical reports from the pre-satellite era. This shows in the cryosphere graph: The openness of Barents Sea is largely due to the weather pattern that exported cold down over North America and imported milder air up over Europe.

Not only did this mean there were times there was no cold air available to form ice in Barents Sea, it also meant that when the ice did form it was exposed to strong winds that moved it out. There were several good surges of ice right by Svalbard, resulting in increases of ice in Fram Strait even as there were decreases in Barents Sea. Briefly the extents were even above normal in the Greenland Sea south of Fram Strait: This differs from the situation in , when a lot of the ice that flushed south through Fram Strait came across the Pole on the Transpolar Drift, reducing the amounts of ice as far away as Bering Strait.

This time the flush comes from a smaller area, largely Barents Sea. It is amazingly mobile. Usually it is south of Fram Strait in only six months, where the break-up of ice ends its life. While some of the ice piling up north of Canada is over five years old, most ice up by the Pole is so mobile it has a hard time seeing a second birthday.

Click map to enlarge. All the features on this map are going to slide to the northeast over the next few days. For the time being nothing is bogging down and occluding, and instead everything is part of a slide, flowing northeast.

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The pulse of sea-ice down through Fram Strait will likely slow and may move the other way for a bit, as all these features pass by to the south. Monday morning could see our temperatures back down near zero Celsius. The long, hard winter wore down an old mare who has been a fixture of my neighborhood for over a quarter century. I think its fat reserves simply got used up. Yesterday she began trotting to and fro, as if to stay warm, and then fell over and lay on her side in the snow, shivering.

I forgot I was sixty-one and joined a crew of passerbys to help get the old horse back up to its feet. It is an end of an era. It was sort of amazing how people appeared as soon as the old mare went down. She was nearly thirty-four. The ridge of high pressure over Iceland will follow it and then build over Scandinavia, as an upper-air blocking-high builds over Scandinavia and becomes a major feature on the map.

No storms will be able to get through Scandinavia for a while, and instead will have to go over the top, or be squashed underneath. Even though the sun is up I expect that air to rapidly cool, because the sun is so low. The ribbon of minus-twenty air crossing the arctic further towards Bering Strait is partially south of eighty degrees latitude, which explains why the DMI polar temperatures graph is showing such an upward spike; it includes the milder air but not the colder air. The change coming is not apparent on the surface map. The ridge of high pressure from the Azores to Iceland will slide east towards Scandinavia and then build in the north.

It looks sunny for Sweden. This high will grow stubborn, and actually cut off the trough of low pressure currently over Europe and roll it backwards until it is off the coast of Spain. Or that is what the models are seeing. Double click these maps to fully enlarge. They are produced by Dr. These sort of blocking highs are interesting to watch. Just looking at surface maps, you scratch your head and wonder at the odd tracks of the storms. From now until next October I make a mental adjustment, when looking at the temperature maps, to take diurnal variation into account.

Roughly speaking, the morning maps have the top of the sphere in daylight, so I expect isotherms to show a temperature rise, as is the case with the top half of the maps in the above example. Then I watch to see if temperatures drop an equal amount twelve hours later. Being aware of this keeps me from leaping to conclusions about warm-ups or cool-downs, and then having to eat my words twelve hours later. This is pushing the slushy and mobile sea ice up against the north coast of Svalbard.

Meanwhile ice which was surging south through Bering Stait has reversed and now is surging north. All in all sea-ice-esxtents are dropping, and may have finally passed their peak. Now lets watch and see is everything screeches to a halt, as that ridge of high pressure over England tilts northeast towards Scandinavia. It is expected to get so strong over the north that the low over Poland will get squeezed backwards through the Baltic, and the low over Italy pressed backwards towards Spain.

The British Isle will have weak storms coming at it from all directions. Fun to watch, but perhaps less fun to be in the midst of it. So far this winter the sheer weight of the cold has pushed a lot of these storms out to sea. Besides work and taxes, I have a little, local talent show to organize for next Sunday. Therefore I am using my psychic powers to wish this storm right out to sea. Do you think it is going to work?

This is the blocking pattern I was looking for all winter, but it is happening too late to do what it would do in December. The fronts extending from Iceland to France should make little eastward progress, and in fact should back to the west. As this flow-from-the-east develops the little low over Poland will take an unusual route, west through the Baltic into the North Sea and may mess up what should be nice weather, in southern Sweden.

In the winter this flow-from-the-east would contain bone-chilling blasts from western Siberia, but that source-region has been greatly moderated by influxes of milder air and by spring sunshine. Part will occlude and mill about to the west, as part gets kicked ahead and smushed southeast towards the Mediterranean. Note how the Gulf Stream is forced to meander by winds blowing its surface waters south, to the southwest of Iceland, but north, northeast of Iceland. If this blocking pattern locked in at the start of a winter, it would bring a lot of warm water north and in some ways be the author of its own demise, by importing warmth into a very cold situation.

However this past winter was the opposite. I have no idea what happens to the Gulf Stream a hundred feet down, in such situations. While the waters west of Norway are near normal and slightly above normal now, that largely reflects the mild winter. As summer comes on these well-mixed waters may fail to warm in a typical manner.

It will be interesting to watch. Features are coming together in both the northern and southern branch to form a big coastal storm. There will be two centers ar first, one on the polar front further out to sea, and one over the arctic front closer to land. The models have been suggesting the polar-front-storm will win out and pull most of the snow out to sea, which is my wish.

In a worst-case-scenario the arctic-front-storm wins, and the snow is far enough west to get big cities and my little farm. It sure looks like a big storm brewing up down the coast, yet there are no watches or warnings. I wonder how they are so sure this storm is going out to sea. Blizzard Warning down on Cape Cod, but we should only get light snow. It should be very windy and cold, though, with gusts to 50 mph. The pressure is steady at This is like January, but they say we might warm up to fifty by Friday.

March 25, at 1: It is fairly regular, but there have been interruptions this winter. Also not as much ice came from the Pole via the Transpolar Drift, but came along the ice-edge north of Svakbard to the east. The ice seems to come through Fram Strait in bulges and pulses. There was a big one at the end of last week.

However if a lot heads south it can actually chill the waters of the North Atlantic. The opposite occurred last summer. The flow through Fram Strait was reduced, as ice was pushed over towards Beaufort Gyre. The extent below Fram Strait was below normal even as sea-ice increased up at the Pole. It makes me wonder if that means the Atlantic waters were chilled less than normal last summer, which may have been part of the reason Barents Sea froze up less last winter. Recently a lot of ice has flushed out and traveled all the way through Denmark Strait to Cape Farewell at the bottom of Greenland.

Also lots of ice has flushed south in Baffin Bay, and passed into the Atlantic off Newfoundland Island. The top of Baffin Bay was ice-free at times in the depth of winter, so much ice was exported south. I imagine the Atlantic has had a good chilling due to the addition of all this ice. The more you watch the ice the more you see about twenty things are going on at the same time. Unless the storm loop-de-loops, which is unlikely, it seems we have dodged the bullet.

I am hugely thankful. I think doing taxes is bad for your health. Also it is the antithesis of poetry. It even seems to keep the sun from shining. The storm did not miss us, in terms of wind. It roared all day long, with the sky battleship grey before noon, and then the sun gradually appearing in sky increasingly milky.

During my shift I took the kids out to the flood control, where the ice was more like January than the final days of March. Usually the ice is rapidly melting by now. They laughed as the wind shoved and in a few cases knocked them down. The goats were also frisky, able to prance and kick up their heels on the snows thick crust as if it were solid ground. So I guess it is spring, no matter what the thermometer says. The flow over the Pole is from Bering Strait towards Svalbard. From Pacific to Atlantic, but weak. Blocking high remains over Scandinavia. It looks milder towards Bering Strait.

Partly it is due to diurnal variation, and it being noon up there, but a weak flow is coming north. Also the strong high over Scandinavia is bringing some nice mildness north towards Iceland. However the Pole and Fram Atrait look to be in a sort of polar doldrums. The block over Scandinavia is obvious, but all the junk around the edges must be murder to figure out. My sympathies to European weathermen. It looks fairly nice over France and in the middle of the high in central Norway, Sweden and Finland, but there is polar junk to the north and Baltic junk to the south.

Over the British Isles it looks unstable aloft, due to occluded junk. Stagnant junk is milling around in the Mediterranean. This map would mean murderous cold in January. The gale in the lower left corner is the big storm that gave us howling winds but no snow yesterday. I never named it. I can never remember the ponds frozen so solidly so late in the spring, in southern New Hampshire. Yesterday was a subfreezing day with gusts over forty mph, with the morning skies a battleship gray. Due to some recent thaws, the snow has a firm crust and is like walking on Styrofoam.

They started frisking about over the stiff crust, twirling and gamboling and prancing and kicking their heels. The children were acting the same. I run a Childcare. Though the wind was brutal and the wind-chill was vicious, I heard no whining and not a single complaint, unless it was my own muttering to myself. Instead I witnessed a huge after-school burst of energy, with the children laughing and shouting and daring the roaring wind to knock them over, and scooting down hills on their stomachs like otters.

It is around 12 Celsius which would be normal for January, but is bizarre for the sixth day of Spring. However the maps show the high is cresting and southwest winds to our west. Flow getting back to normal in Fram Strait, as the weak low squeezes around the northern side of the blocking high pressure over Scandinavia. This map is a satellite product, showing the temperature of the top of the ice and also water, I think. White areas represent missing data, I think. It will be interesting to watch in the summer, to see when the surface gets warm enough to start melting.

I have a bad case of insomnia due to tax-worries, and drown my sorrows by animating this feature. March 27, at 6: Thanks for sharing that new DMI feature. When you animate it, it shows three totally cool things. First, it shows the ice reflecting the cross-polar flow of frigid air from Siberia to Canada, at the end of the winter.

This is the supply of the air that has been freezing our socks off, down in the USA. Second, it shows the air in this flow becoming less brutal as the sun gets higher over Siberia. Eastern Siberia has some of the greatest temperature extremes on earth. Third, it shows cracks forming and then freezing over in the Arctic Sea, as thin lines of warmer ice-surface temperature which then vanish as they freeze over.

These leads cracks have to be fairly large to be seen from outer space. Ordinary leads are too thin to be visible. My feeling is that these cracks chill the water more than usual by exposing it. They are less likely to form when a zonal flow around and around the Pole brings calm to the central arctic. They are more likely to form when there is cross-polar-flow and the ice is exposed to stronger winds.

Now that the sun has risen on the Pole we can use our lying eyes to examine the ice up there with satellite pictures. You can see there were some fairly huge leads formed, up there in the windy winter darkness, for the new ice is darker than the old ice, albeit sometimes thick enough to be a milky color rather than pure white. While the cracks do not seem as extensive as they were two winters ago, my guess is that the Arctic Sea has again been chilled.

While I am sure DMI has some political appointees at higher levels, demanding maps be tinted differently, I think generally their products are good, due to hard workers at lower levels. After all, some Danes work at the edge of the ice, and if the DMI gets too political and produces false maps, people may die. That is a reality-check the people at the University Of Maine seem untroubled by. The blocking high over Scandinavia is starting to bring north windsdown over Finland and Swedan, as it backs and extends across the North Atlantic towards Greenland.

It is forming a wall. Already it is occluded and weaker, up mb from around mb.

But Wait, There’s More!

It will may little headway against the blocking high, and will get squashed and ooze around the block to the south, kicking its energy southeast towards the low east of Spain, which is going nowhere. Until this block erodes storms in the Atlantic will just spin their wheels and generally weaken. Yesterday was a lovely sunny day of relenting wind and cold, with temperatures nudging a above freezing and the sap again starting to dip into the buckets by the maple trees.

This morning I hear sleet tapping on my window. Milder air brings moisture, and its still a bit to cold for rain. Just for an hour or two today it was above fifty. At one point I simply stood feeling the wind and sprinkles of rain in my face with my eyes shut. I felt like I was standing in the bow of a ship forging ahead to a better land.

Sometimes our hopes are a sort of myopia. What actually occurs is better than what we hoped, even if it is brief. The forecast is abysmal: Freezing rain Sunday and Monday. Seldom do I hope for just rain, but this time I am. A strong cross-polar-flow is bringing ice and cold air back from Alaska north of Greenland and down into Scandinavia. The high pressure block is very apparent from Greenland to the Baltic.

Just imagine if this was December! Then remember that the way a winter fades away often give hints how the next winter will begin. A strong flow from the north east of Finland turns right and becomes a flow from the east all the way west to Iceland and then on to Greenland. This marks the boundary of the blocking high pressure.

Taxie has squashed against that wall like a bug. People around here still suffer from Post-traumatic-shock-syndrome, due to an ice-storm that knocked out power for over ten days, five years ago. That is why I hoped for rain, when they were forecasting freezing rain. However now we have flood warnings, with up to three inches forecast. Be careful what you hope for.

Talent show tomorrow is in the way of finishing my taxes. It will be the perfect thing to do on a rainy day that turns the local world to slush. The exit region for polar air now appears to be down over Scandinavia. The blocking high continues to tap Atlantic air south of Iceland. The Pole is gradually cooling, despite the fact the sun is up. Two can live as cheaply as one.

The blocking high pressure will only slowly erode, and is likely to still be a fature on the map bu Friday. Scandinavia is on the colder side, with northwest winds, but the British Isles have lucked out and are getting mild, southeast winds from France. Weather looks fair and tranquil for most of Europe, though cooler air is trying to edge westward from the east.

All went well, and people had fun. Everyone forgot the weather for a bit. This is the first storm to stall all winter. It is whirling south of New York City, and the rain you see over Cape Cod is moving northwest towards me, cooling as it rises. It is a relief to look out into the blackness from the front porch and hear nothing but dripping and gurgling, and the rushing of the freshet over the ruined dam in the woods. I can sit back and enjoy my coffee in peace, without needing to rush off and clear walkways.

I may have to lay some planks across puddles, and drain a few other puddles, but I sort of like digging little channels in the mud and watching the water flow off in rivulets. The igloo at the Childcare collapsed on Friday, and we have lost a lot of snow since then. Not that rain a degree above freezing melts as well as a warm rain, but a few south-facing embankments are showing brown grass. The bare ground is showing its face for the first time since December. It is funny how such events come together. At first there is an unwillingness on the part of people to budge from their winter immobility, but then, as the event approaches, a subtle anticipation starts to grow.

People start to suggest things, and to offer things. Then the show itself was full of fun, with the youngest performer aged five and the oldest aged ninety. Keep your expectations low, and rather than disappointed you are astonished by the goodness you see. I expect people will be remembering things and chuckling all week. I spoke too soon. I just looked out the window, and in the purple light of a rainy dawn I can see the rain has turned to a gloppy sort of falling slush. What do you expect from a Monday? The Morphy mess is also creating a visual swirl in the isotherms in the temperature map.

It looks colder on the Canadian side, and slightly colder towards Bering Strait. Is a block forming there as well? Usually I pity European weathermen, but for some odd reason this bizarre map has me envying them. You have a warm front pressing across Iceland from the northeast, as a cold front approaches Ireland and England from the southwest.

I assume a lovely plume of mild air is being ushered up from the topless beaches in the south of France across England to Iceland, as arctic air from frigid Canada crosses the Atlantic and swings up from the south. There may be some thunder in Cornwall tonight, but it seems bizarre that the cold air is coming from the south as, in Iceland, the warm air comes from the north. Not likely, this week. Central Europe and France looks like they get to celebrate springtime. The blocking high will gradually weaken and center over Scandinavia, so the north winds will give way to calm and then south winds a week from now.

The Pole continues to cool but still is above normal. Things are quiet on the Canadian and Bering Strait sides. I have to cover for a member of my staff who hurt her back. Then I have a state-required class to take tonight. However the dawn is lovely, as we are between Drench and Foolerson. The blocking high pressure is still in place, with Iceland on the warm side and Svalbard on the cold side. The Morphy Mess is being strengthened by the addition of a low coming up from the Sreppes, and it looks like the mild side of that low is managing to push some milder air up towards the Pole.

This is quite a change from January, when south winds from Siberia are so cold. That high has created a strange situation over the British Isles, where the much-modified air over southern England is from the Canadian arctic, while to the north the much-modified air over Scotland is from the south coast of France. Taxie is liable to bring milder air over much of the British Isles briefly, though it is difficult to figure out the flows when things are basically stagnant. That is a developing storm that will clip northern Scandinavia. I also think it is indicative of the crumbling of the blocking high pressure.