Chad's spot for various thoughts, musings, poetry, ideas and whatnot

Tuesday, January 27, 2004

Missed by Just That Much

You may recall that a few weeks ago I wrote about being a weather junkie. Always on the lookout for the big storm, tracking the weather service reports of temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction and all the rest like a heroin junkie trying to track down a fix. The big winter storm came this last weekend and I almost missed it and it just missed me.

I almost missed it because, like is often the case with these things, the storm was a little tricky. The meteorologists first said we'd get some rain and the like and all the cold stuff would stay to our north. Interesting but not personally affecting to me. I had a couple of cycling sponsorship events to do and a little rain, especially since it looked to be coming in Sunday evening, didn't really change things much. Two things should have clued me in. The first was a little "hedging our bets" line in the Friday evening forecast about how this storm might develop a bit differently that the official forecast said. What that meant was that a couple of the computer models weren't quite giving the same answers as all the others and that the local meteorologist's intution was telling him that maybe those models were more correct than the national office was giving them credit for. The second thing was the glorious day we had on Saturday for the first L5Flyers/New Zealand Foods team ride. I mean, for there to be a day like that in January should have been a dead giveaway of serious atmospheric instability.

So Sunday, we head up to Gainesville for the GAP awards banquet with the rest of the "On Your Left" gang. It rains cats and dogs all the way up, all during the banquet, all during the post-banquet festivities at the Park's and all the way home. On the way up the temperature started to slide and I started to have a feeling that the bet had been hedged forecast-wise. So as we're hightailing it home, things are starting to deteriorate. We see a few cars inthe ditches and a lot of accident patrols out. When we get home, I check the forecast and the county-by-county map for north Georgia, South Carolina and North Carolina has more colors than the terrorism threat chart. The big fear is becoming freezing rain which is ten times worse here in the south than snow. The big question is how far south will it go. Already all of Atlanta was in the warning area and there were rumblings that it might extend further south than that. I went to bed wondering about it all after a two hour recovery spin on the rollers.

I got up the next morning wondering. I looked out the window and things didn't look bad at all. When I got into the car though there was a thin layer of ice on the windshield. Easy enough to clear but worrisome as the storm wasn't done. I got to work and saw the line of thunderstorms moving our way on the NOAA radar. Yikes! Other faculty from further north started coming in saying that there was ice as far south as 15 miles to our north and it was bad up in Atlanta. Then the weather service issued the first of the tornado watches for a few counties south of us. Ice to the north and severe thunderstorms to the south, what a combo! So I watched over the next couple of hours as thunderstorms trained over us with deluge after downpour. Once that cleared , in came the wind and the temps dropped even more from the mid-30's to the low-30's. If we got another shot of moisture while the temperature was that low we'd get the freezing precip in the trees and on the power lines. We hovered on the line all through the day and into the evening until at about 8:30 pm the temperature edged up a bit to about 34 F and I knew we were out of the woods.

Fortunately, all of the ugly stuff stayed either north or south and we have remained just a bit soggy. The power's been up and down a bit but nothing bad. Our downstairs furnace has gone on the friz but hopefully we'll get that fixed today before the really cold air moves in behind the storm with all the wind. Still though, further north things are bad. About 40 people have died due to the storm and for the mid-Atlantic and New England states there's more stuff on the way.

That's the amazing thing about the weather that some people never seem to get...it doesn't care. It's a big, impersonal force of nature that has more energy than we humans can ever comprehend. Why people don't hunker down is beyond me but they don't. They think they can go with their lives as if the weather won't hurt them. The very thing that makes the weather so fascinating, it's enormous power, is also what makes it so deadly. All that energy can create forces at the mere twitch of a variable differential; a slight change in pressure, an anomally of temperature, small eddies borne out of slight wind shear can all blossom into frighteningly destructive phenomena that can affect hundreds or thousands or even millions.

Just missed.

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