A Little Bit Extreme

The second of two huge winter storms is atop us now, and is forecast to spread across the country to Washington and New York on Monday.  It comes with no interval from the first, leaving a continuous week of frigid Arctic air.  There is hardly a corner of the U.S. not touched by the cold, if not snow, frozen rain and wind.

Four people died overnight south of us in California, and of the 9 deaths attributed to the weather nationally, 8 were from hypothermia and exposure.  In other words, old people and homeless people.

For us in our normally unchanging strip of coast, a weird burst of summer turned into the coldest temperatures I can remember here (with officially record lows for several nights), although we did have a cold and clear period early last winter, too.  It is all a reminder of vulnerabilities and preparations, as climate disruption jars weather patterns to the big and extreme.

By most standards, our cold temps aren't extreme--into the low 20s at night, with daytime highs in the low 40s or 30s. But this is very unusual here. We're not really equipped here for temperatures that go below freezing for a week at a time, any more than we are for hot temperatures for a week at a time.   Pacific Gas & Electric is already curtailing natural gas to Humboldt State, so the university buildings are not heated part of the time.  I assume they're starting with institutions first before curtailing gas to homes, but that's the other problem: we have really lousy news media, and all the Internet seems to offer is pretty pictures with no meaning.  You really have to search to get an actionable idea of what's going on.

Temps are usually in the mild range even in winter here, so 60s/50s in the dry seasons become 50s/40s in the wet winter.  So there are a lot of homes that depend on wood stoves for heat.  Probably not well insulated.  Practically no houses have basements.  We're just not adapted to even the extremes of western PA.  We have to wonder whether this is a taste of the future.

This storm will eventually touch much of the country, including Pittsburgh and Washington, which also make it different.  We usually don't experience this particular bond of weather.  Our exceptionalism is non-operative.

Right now it's cold and windy and rainy.  I guess it's not yet time to worry about how deep the water lines are (ours used to freeze up occasionally in PA.)  I do worry about the hummingbirds.  I'm seeing three of them around the feeders often these days.  They made it through last night, but the coldest night forecast is yet to come before temps start to head more towards normal on Monday.  Two of them seem abnormally frenetic, and the other seems abnormally torpid.

The first storm dumped an amazing amount of snow across the U.S. (and pretty far south in places), and this second storm is forecast to do the same.  Lots of problems in cities, on roads, flights cancelled, etc.  At least one of the bloggers at Weather Underground had to go back to 1950 to find a similar early winter storm pattern. This is happening in the contiguous U.S. around the same time that the UK and western Europe gets hammered by ferocious storms and cold.