Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
from the updraft blog:
Category Archives: Weather +Climate
Bomb Cyclogenesis, Dropping on the East Coast
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Found this on MPR’s updraft blog.
It’s called”Bomb Cyclogenesis.” That’s the weather geeky term given to rapidly 
intensifying east coast lows that spin up and deepen rapidly. East Coast bombs feed off of warm Atlantic and Gulf Stream waters, and cold air diving south from Canada. It’s a unique geographic situation. The following explanation from this website.
Simply put, bomb cyclogenesis is the formation of an “extratropical area of low pressure in which the central barometric pressure drops at least 24 millibars in 24 hours.” [1] However, it should be noted that this represents the most common case in areas that are north of 60 degrees latitude. Sanders and Gyakum, who coined the term “Bomb Cyclones” set the pressure falls needed to reach bomb status at 19 millibars in 24 hours at 45 degrees and 23 millibars in 24 hours at 55 degrees.
Seasonal
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
This graphic heralds seasonal change here as much as holiday lights.
The Next Ice Age
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
A beautiful day outside. Cerulean sky dotted with torn off candy cotton chunks of cumulus. A bright sun. Now all we need is snow. As this winter bears down on us, even though slowly, I find myself occasionally feeling sad about the children of Minnesota future who will not know the onset of deep winter, cold that makes you stand up straight and say, Oh.
They will know, I realized, the long nights of winter still. Global warming has no effect on the tilt of the earth, but it seems strange to think of the Winter Solstice night coming in Minnesota and not needing a parka to be out celebrating it. They will not, of course, no any different, it will be for them the way things have always been. Who’s to say that will be bad? At least from an emotional perspective.
Then again the Holocene has encompassed the rise and rise of humans from veldt to the 
moon and it is only 11,000 plus years old. We take it as normal. Really, it’s just an interglacial, as geologists call the warm periods beyond the periodic advances of the ice sheets that define an ice age.
The last one is not completely over as this shot I took in the Chilean fjords shows.
It’s easy to forget that the interglacials are the exception and ice cover the rule over the last couple of million years . The normal interglacial lasts around 10,000 years and we’re overdue for a change.
Yes, global warming will put off the next ice age, but eventually fossil fuels will either all be burned or we will have stopped burning them. Then, the atmosphere will lose carbon by its reabsorption into the oceans and back into carbonate minerals. (T.C. Cook, MIT Technology Review, Global warming versus the next Ice Age) At that point the subtle effects of Jupiter and Saturn will elongate our orbit again and the sun’s energetic contribution to the northern climates will decrease. Then, the ice sheets will come creeping back. And too soon in my book.
Planning. Oh, Yeah.
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Yesterday I wandered into new territory with Dramatica Pro, a software program aid to writing fiction. It will help me do the kind of advanced planning that my work almost never gets: character development, plot sequencing, character roles, key scenes, creating throughlines and how characters and action play off against them.
Still in the midst of learning it, will take a while. It will take the spot of the MOOCs as my current learning experience.
I like these gray, rainy days but the brilliant flash of lightning and the roll of thunder yesterday afternoon brought a bit of seasonal displacement in its trail.
Everything You Need
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
“If you have a garden and a library, you have everything you need.”
Cicero
I’m set. The library surrounds me as I write this and the garden is two weeks into its winter slumber. Cicero and I agree about life’s necessities, books and a place to grow food and flowers. Between them they service the body and the mind.
It’s a dull, grey November day. Rain dribbles out of the sky, unwilling to commit. The temperature remains in a warmer trend, 45 today, a trend our weather forecaster says will remain until early December. I hope so since we’re headed out across the plains a week from tomorrow, exposing ourselves to the wind driven weather coming down, with no topographical resistance, from the Arctic.
Finishing up ModPo and getting off the Latin plateau I had inhabited for many weeks has left me in a satisfied Holiseason state of mind. Before them Modern and Post Modern ended and the garden got put to bed, the Samhain bonfire held. So this is a time of endings, as Samhain celebrates, and festival season beginnings. The unusual confluence of Hanukkah and Thanksgiving means the whole last week of November will be celebratory. In December then we can focus on Yule, the Winter Solstice and the pagan side of Christmas.
In the coming weeks I look forward to finishing Missing’s 5th revision and getting it off to the copy editor, learning Dramatic Pro and using it as I develop Loki’s Children while I continue to work in the new “in” the Latin style that Greg pushed me towards. This will also be a time when I consolidate my understanding of the Modern and the Post Modern and do some more writing around that, especially as it changes and informs my Reimagining My Faith project.
Reading poetry more regularly will also be part of the next few weeks, too. I want to continue my immersion in poetry. One of the ModPo teaching assistants, Amaris Cuchanski, said poetry is the leading edge of consciousness and I believe she’s right.
Asleep
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Another implication of the fallow season had escaped me, at least at the level Jim Gilbert describes in a recent phenology column in the Star-Tribune:
“Hibernation is a winterless life chosen by reptiles, amphibians, insects and some mammals. During the winter untold millions of animals — including toads, frogs, salamanders, snapping turtles, garter snakes, bats, woodchucks and mosquito larvae — are hibernating across Minnesota.”
We often miss the warm period lives of these creatures because many of them are small, secretive and prefer to remain well away from humans. Their winter lives, in the millions, untold millions Gilbert says, never massed together in my mind.
(this wonderful piece by Travis Demillo.)
Walking in our woods right now there are thousands of salamanders, toads, frogs, garter snakes, woodchucks, various insects, ground squirrels and gophers in a state of suspended animation, dreaming small animal dreams until the weather becomes more suitable for their life again next year. It gives the woods a haunted, Snow White sort of atmosphere with so many of its active and vibrant lifeforms stilled to the point of coma. And by intention. Well, evolutionarily adapted intention that is.
Here’s a lifted glass to their long night, a safe sleep and a welcome return.
Moving into Winter
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
The snow came. Wet and heavy, it presses down on tree branches, putting those with leaves under stress. These snows can crack limbs as it did to the cedar trees we cultivated for so long just off our deck.
These early snows are not the snows of romance and greeting cards. They clump and weigh, turn immediately into slush underfoot, leaking through footwear. They don’t last long since the same temperatures that create them, once daylight appears, will begin to melt them.
They can drop the temperature since snow cover is one of the factors that keeps a winter cold. It’s the albedo effect. White snow reflects the sunlight back into space, where it warms the air, but not the ground. That’s also why Minnesota’s tendency under previous climate regimes to keep snow cover around for the whole winter made us colder. If the earth is bare, it soaks up some of the sun’s heat and raises air temperature near the ground.
In the months after Samhain the sun recedes, losing power. Not only are the days shorter, but the angle of the sun spreads what sunlight we receive over a larger area, weakening its intensity. These are not months favorable to the vegetative world. In reading an article about Samhain in the New York Times the writer reminded me of a key element of the Samhain season, the tallying up of the amount of fodder available to feed animals.
When the number of animals exceeded the available feed, farmers culled their herds until they were sustainable. This meant that there was often meat at Samhain, but the slaughter added another death related aspect to the holiday.
Snowing
Samhain Thanksgiving Moon
Snow has begun to fall, pelting down in thick wet clumps. It could be that we’ll get enough to plow. Maybe. We have a snow plower contracted and he’ll be here tomorrow if we need him. Our Simplicity snow blower worked very well for us over the 16 plus years we had it, but I grew weary of getting up early to blow the snow and fuss with the inevitable mechanical difficulties. When our Tundra collapsed, we no longer had a straightforward way of moving it.
Now the snow can come and Jeremy will remove what we need removed. The deck off our kitchen needs shoveling, too, but I do that. I like being able to enjoy the snow. There’s something soothing and quintessentially northern about snow. It represents the southward sweep of polar conditions, a reminder that once again, even though we warm the globe now, that ice and snow will cover most of this state again as it has in the geologic past.
These first snows also serve as heralds of the winter holidays, reminding us of hot chocolate, cookies and roaring fires.
Let It Snow
Samhain New (Thanksgiving) Moon
A quiet, wet night with the temperature already at 33. A snow storm is in the prediction for tomorrow night. We’re ready for it and I’d like to see it. It would tamp down the leaves we used for mulch, help them stay in place.
Early snow cover, though this would not be it, serves as good a purpose as mulch for keeping the ground cold. Yes, paradoxical as it seems, that nice blanket of leaves or straw or a snow mound works to prevent frost heaves in the often violent temperature shifts as winter ends. Those shifts can literally uproot plants, destroy just begun growth. So, you want to keep the bed cold and let it thaw out gradually.