Wilder Weather

Have no fear — the Little House on the Prairie museum site is safe!

At the kind invitation of museum director Michelle Martin, I took an overnight trip to Independence, Kansas, to present about the Wilder Weather of Laura’s books!  I gave the presentation twice through the day, for about 45 minutes each time, to an audience of adults and children of all ages (not to mention one persistent wasp!).  We discussed events ranging from the tornado in These Happy Golden Years, to the prairie fires in Little House on the Prairie, to the droughts in On the Banks of Plum Creek and The First Four Years, to the signature information on blizzards and chinooks from The Long Winter.  I had a blast presenting there, and Michelle did a great job organizing the event and taking care of her speakers and guests!

(Photo courtesy of Michelle Martin)

I also had the chance to see the LHOTP site for the first time.  What struck me the most was the landscape.  In Laura’s book, the Kansas prairie is wide open, with nary a tree in sight except for a few along the creek bottoms.  The land is a great circle of grass from horizon to horizon.  Now, trees interrupt the landscape, turning the wide-open prairie into a patchwork of somewhat open fields instead.

Why the change?  Aren’t we humans known for cutting down trees when we move in, rather than adding them?

Not in the Great Plains.

There are a few factors that have resulted in an increase in trees over the last 150 years.  The first reason goes back to a topic I covered in my talk:  prairie fires.  Before the area was widely settled, naturally-sparked fires (usually from lightning strikes) burned freely across the prairie, especially in the early spring when lightning is on the increase and grass hasn’t yet greened up for the season.  Other fires were set by Native Americans, again usually in the early spring before green-up, to burn off the old, dead grass and allow fresh growth to attract animals.  When white settlers arrived and built permanent structure, they were less inclined to favor fires threatening their homes and businesses.  So, policies of fire suppression arrived in the late 19th century.  Many ranchers still burn their grounds in the spring in Kansas, but areas that are more dedicated to farming or are near more settled areas are not burned.  This allows the brushy undergrowth that used to burn away every few years to grow up into trees and scrub.

A second factor in the increase of trees dates back to the Dust Bowl era.  Soil conservationists learned a hard lesson, especially on the High Plains (from the Texas and Oklahoma panhandles through eastern Colorado, western Kansas, western Nebraska, and the western Dakotas), that plowing up all the land and stripping root structures from the ground allowed the loose soil to be lifted by the wind, creating the famous dusters or “black blizzards“.  The scientists learned that building a row of trees every mile or so would decrease the effect of the wind in the lee of the trees, essentially slowing down the wind and also providing a root structure to hold down the soil.  Thus, shelterbelts were born, and those belts continue to impact the landscape across the Plains.  They provide a number of benefits beyond soil conservation, including increased habitats for animals and shelter from blowing snow, but they have also changed the look of the land from Laura’s day.

The third factor is much simpler:  people tend to plant trees around their homes and towns, to break the wind and provide shade.  Pa did it on the homestead near DeSmet, and thousands of others have done the same.

The result is a much more treed landscape now than what used to exist in the beginning of settlement across just about all of the Great Plains region.  Many people enjoy the trees, many do not, but either way, they are here to stay, and the great circle of grass that Laura saw is now elusive.

P.S.  On my trip to Independence, I stayed at the Apple Tree Inn and ate dinner at Uncle Jack’s.  I’d recommend both to anyone else staying in the area for a Laura visit (though Uncle Jack’s is more of an adult place than a family place, being a bar and grill).

On March 29, I participated in the Making of the Great Plains symposium at the University of Nebraska.  The conference debuted a new style of presenting information:  electronic posters!  We electronic poster presenters were charged with creating a display of our research that we would show on a 40″ monitor hooked up to our computers.  What a daunting task for someone who is not a graphic designer or creative video producer!

The results of my electronic poster efforts are here.  I expect that this site will undergo more development now that it exists.  In the meantime, I’d love to hear from you if you do view the videos.  What other topics would you like to see more information about?

And my thanks to the generous folks from the symposium’s organizing committee who named my poster “Best Electronic Poster, First Place”!

Remember the winter after the Long Winter?

It was described in Little Town on the Prairie.  If you’re struggling to remember it, don’t feel bad — there wasn’t much of a winter there at all.  Laura describes mild temperatures and little snowfall during the winter of 1881-82.  The Ingalls family, once bitten by the Long Winter, are twice shy; they prepared carefully in the fall of 1881 for another brutal winter.  Haystacks were moved to town, along with livestock and accidentally discovered Christmas presents.  Fuel and food supplies were laid in, and family battened down the hatches.

And then… nothing.

Mild days passed by into mild months, with little precipitation.  The winter of 1881-82 stands among the top 5 or 10 mildest winters across the region, which is even more remarkable of a feat because the decade of the 1880s is the coldest in modern records, with a number of years among the top 5 to 10 coldest winters in the region.  It was mild even by the standards of today’s climate, let alone the cooler climate of the late 1800s.

We have reached spring, and the winter of 2011-12 is shifting to the rear-view mirror.  It was among the mildest on record across the country, with a persistent lack of snow cover and a noticeable deficit of Arctic air.  For many Plains dwellers, it was a relief after the cold and snowy winters of 2009-10 and 2010-11 that preceded it.  March might very well be the warmest on record across much of the northern U.S., with record warm temperatures dropping like the skiers I see out the window*.

What happened to winter this year?  Where did it go?

Many of you know that meteorologists watch the higher levels of the atmosphere carefully to track the river of air known as the “jet stream”.  There actually is not usually just one jet stream, but rather several.  The northern one, known as the “polar jet”, tends to be up around Canada in the winter, dropping into the U.S. to bring the coldest of air for a visit.  The southern one, known as the “subtropical jet”, locks in somewhere around the latitude of the Gulf Coast.  As you can guess, it can bring warmer and wetter air in from the tropical oceans.  A really good storm (that’s meteorologist-good!) can occur when the two jet streams converge, which we weather weenies call “phasing”.  The cold air from the polar jet combined with the moisture from the subtropical jet sets up the nastier of storms.

This year, the jet streams stayed in their separate corners, which the weather weenies call “split flow”.  When we had a storm system that brought moisture up from the oceans, the cold air was locked away to the north.  The two did not cooperate, which means that they did not bring impressive snowstorms and cold outbreaks to the U.S.  We also held onto a positive, or warm, North Atlantic Oscillation throughout the winter, keeping us on the warm side even when the related Arctic Oscillation fell out of step and went negative, bringing a rough cold outbreak to Europe in February.

The early bloom across the Plains does have a few of us worried that a late freeze (especially a hard freeze) could damage some of the premature plants.  Recall that after the careful preparation for a hard winter that never materialized, the Ingalls family moved back to the claim early that spring… where they were hit by a late spring blizzard.  We have no blizzards on the horizon, but cold snaps late in the spring are still possible.  Keep a wary eye on your tender vegetation through the spring!

*I am currently on a brief vacation in Utah to visit a friend, and while my husband and our friend are skiing, I’m cozied in the lodge with a panorama of snow-capped mountains, skiers of varying abilities descending slopes of varying grades, and chair lifts.  It’s an inspirational winter scene in the midst of a very summery spring.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

Laura readers, ever notice that she hardly ever talks about being sick?  Other than a near-fatal bout with diphtheria in The First Four Years and the “fever ‘n ague” (malaria) in Little House on the Prairie, and the scarlet fever illness that was implied between On the Banks of Plum Creek and By the Shores of Silver Lake, Laura never talked about getting sick.  Maybe all of that isolation in cold, remote houses limited the family’s exposure to germs.  Maybe she had a whopper of a constitution (she did live to age 90, after all).  Or maybe she just didn’t talk about boring colds in her books.  If only I had her fortitude, either to not get sick or to not talk about it!  Well, at least this cold has me sitting still long enough to write a little.

Our temperatures today in Omaha only reached the 30s, with lows in the teens last night and again tonight.  This is the coldest weather we’ve had in a few weeks, and it’s still only just getting down to normal temperatures.  I wrote a little web story about why the weather on the Plains has been so warm for much of the winter, but I’ll give the cliff’s notes here, too.

One reason for the warmth is that the snowpack across the Plains remains scarce.  In fact, there simply isn’t much snow at all from North Dakota to Texas and from the Colorado plains to the Great Lakes.  When there is snow on the ground, the sun’s energy is reflected more easily… and what is left of the sun’s energy goes into melting that snow.  Without the snow on the ground, the sun’s energy can go right to heating up the ground and the air.

Another reason for the warmer weather has been the persistent weather pattern, with the jet stream running pretty much west to east instead of dropping out of Canada.  This is related to a pattern called the North Atlantic Oscillation (or NAO).  When the NAO is positive, the flow across the central and eastern US into the Atlantic Ocean tends to be more straight east to west, and those areas tend to be warmer than normal.  In a negative NAO, the opposite is true: a low pressure area sets up in the eastern US, with flow out of the northwest in the central and eastern US, which dumps cold air into those areas.  The last two winters (2009-10 and 2010-11) were dominated by negative NAO (in fact, the winter of 2009-10 was one of the strongest negative NAOs since the mid-1800s, if not the strongest).  This winter, so far, we’ve been dominated by positive NAO.

By the way, in case you’re wondering (and I was!), the Long Winter of 1880-81 was dominated by a strong negative NAO.

So even though it’s not too cold, it feels cold… and I have a cold, which makes it feel colder.  But I also have a warm fire, a lovely Christmas tree that is about to come down, and what remains of the chicken soup I was smart enough to make yesterday when I first got a scratchy throat.  And the cold was kind enough to hold off until after our New Year’s Eve festivities.  The mild winter continues in the heartland, and forecasts indicate it will continue for at least the next week.  Better make hay while the sun shines!

We had a flirtation with snow back in early November, but it was only on the ground for a few brief hours.  From a meteorologist point of view, it “counts” as a snow… but from a girl gazing out the window for the first snow of the year that’s going to mean something, it hardly meant anything.  I wanted a winter wonderland… and I got it!

Our snow over the weekend (December 3rd) was much more substantial, and now I think we can safely say that we’ve entered the winter season!  We measured 3.8 inches at our house, while just 15 miles away at the office, that total was up to 6.3 inches.  Such a short distance between the haves and the have-mores!  I did indeed measure it, note when it started and stopped, and play in it.  (JJ had a hard time figuring out how to fetch snowballs, though!)  I even shoveled it, and let me tell you, that was a wet and sticky snow!  Best of all, JJ surprised me with how long he played in the snow.  I haven’t seen him run laps in the snowy backyard like that since we left Pennsylvania 6 years ago!

Shoveling snow late on 12/3/11, with JJ heading out to play in the backyard... again!

The snow is still on the ground, and looking ahead to the weather forecast, I don’t think it’ll be going away anytime soon.  Will it still be here at Christmas?  We’ll have to wait and see!  It puts me in the mood to get my tree up and bake some Christmas goodies.  Unfortunately, all of that will have to wait until my semester ends.  Or until I have the urge to procrastinate my term paper and final exam studies :).  Lately, I’ve been feeling as exasperated as Laura did in Little Town on the Prairie before the literaries began — right down to wooden swearing and wanting to play while I’m still young.   Even Laura took a break from her studies to have fun sometimes, right?  Did it really hurt her in life to get only a 92-plus in arithmetic?

Well, time to buckle down again.  The snow and festivities will have to wait.

The Colorado and Wyoming mountains and plains saw their first snowfall of the season earlier this week, and now the East Coast and adjacent mountains are getting their turn.  So far, the Great Plains have been snow-free.  Wonder when our turn will be?  Anybody care to guess, or to share your sentiments about the first snow of the season (this season, or just in general)?

For me, the first snow is usually quiet, calm, easy, peaceful.  It begs for blankets, crackling fireplaces, soup, and football.  I don’t want to shovel it, but I do want to measure it, walk on it, maybe even play with it just a little.  I want to watch it when it starts.  I want to know when it starts to “stick” (accumulate).  I want to know how much fell when it is done.  And I want to know when it melts away… and it had better melt away!

My 11-year-old puppy JJ, with his tender paws, sees things quite differently.  He’d just like me to wipe his paws clean, thank you very much, and leave him a spot in front of the fire.

I have been waiting for a long time for the weather to change and inspire me to write a new blog entry, but we’ve been stuck in the same pattern for the better part of a month!  We had some cool nights in September, but so far, we haven’t had our first freeze yet in Omaha.  Instead, we’ve had a string of mild and pleasant days with pleasantly cool nights.

Maybe we’ve even had too many of them, as we saw the fire danger increase last week when some really dry air stuck around.  Prairie fires are just as possible in the fall as in the spring.  In both seasons, the vegetation is dry.  In both seasons, we’re more likely to have a windy but dry weather pattern.  In both seasons, farmers are out on equipment such as tractors and combines that can spark fires.  We’ve seen a few small fires in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa, but there was a bigger one last week out west, near the small town of Stapleton, Nebraska.

In our case, we’ve now had around a quarter to a half inch of rain through the weekend… but that was our first in several weeks, and we’re still behind the curve for fall rain.  The humidity is up a little bit again.  But we’re not quite out of the woods yet.

I found a better graphic for freeze dates than the one I posted in my last entry.  Take a look here to see both the median (something like the average) first freeze date and also where freezes have occurred to date across the Midwest.  The images are courtesy of my great friends at the Midwest Regional Climate Center.

After a summer that tipped the scales on the warm side, fall weather seems to have arrived to eastern Nebraska all at once!  Corn fields are beginning to turn a harvest gold, and bright yellow sunflowers (and ragweed!) are in full bloom.  Daytime temperatures have lingered in the 70s, with nighttime low temperatures dipping into the 40s, and humidity has taken a plunge.  Skies are bright blue and mostly clear, not murky with extra humidity (water vapor) in the air.  In other words, it looks and feels like autumn is upon us!

Autumn means many things to many people; among these are heading back to school, readying for the harvest, tailgating and watching football, and soaking up the outdoors as much as possible before winter’s chill pushes us into shelter.  I’ve been working on all of those items on the list, though my “harvest” is limited to picking some zucchini out of our community garden at work.

Our average first frost in eastern Nebraska is around early October, just a couple of short weeks away.  Are you ready?

It has been an exciting weekend!  After seeing information from the last conference at which I presented about the Long Winter, a science reporter at USAToday.com became interested in Laura’s Long Winter.  The result is a very nice feature article in the Tech section of USAToday.com published on Sunday, August 21.

Awesome news for fans of weather, climate, Laura Ingalls Wilder, and storytelling! 🙂

I finally had enough of a summer break to read The Wilder Life by Wendy McClure, a book that had been on my reading list since it was released several months ago.  It’s a great read for anybody who used to pretend that (s)he was showing Laura around our modern world and describing our modern life to her in language as poetic as Laura used to describe the scenery to Mary (whew…. I wasn’t the only one who did that!).  Of course, one part stands out to me, and it involves weather.  I literally laughed out loud when I was reading Wendy’s account of surviving a good Plains nighttime thunderstorm in her covered wagon shelter.  In fact, I even read parts of it out loud to hubby, because I knew he would appreciate it, where he otherwise leaves the Laura obsession to me.

We talk about weather safety a LOT in our industry.  Stay out of water and away from metal objects outdoors in the lightning.  Don’t go outside to collect hailstones while it’s hailing.  Tents and thunderstorms rarely go well together.  Listen to NOAA Weather Radio for watches and warnings in your area.  Thank you, Wendy, for demonstrating many of the safety tips in such laughable fashion!  I can’t get the image out of my mind of lying in a flimsy shelter inches from a grid of metal bolts, just waiting to become electrified (still laughing!).  And Laura described well the hazards of going outside to collect hail, as her neighbor did in The First Four Years before being thumped on the noggin by his lack of judgment.  Thank you, Wendy, for demonstrating learning from the mistakes of others!  But I do wish you would have gone outside after the hail was done to collect a bit, estimate the size of the largest piece (quarter? golf ball? baseball?), and relayed that to your nearest National Weather Service office to be recorded into our storm event historical records!  (Yes, your nearest NWS office always welcomes those reports when thunderstorms roll through!)

For all of you who wander the Plains in the warm season to visit Laura sites or otherwise travel through, I do have a few tips.  First, bring a portable NOAA weather radio and make it your best friend.  Most have a “silent” mode that keeps it quiet unless a watch or warning plays over the weather airwaves.  You can pick up a signal from at least one tower almost everywhere across the Plains.  The weather radio will beep loudly at you if severe weather threatens your area, even when you don’t know the area.  Which brings me to the second tip:  Learn the names of the county you’re in and what part of the county you’re in, the surrounding counties, and a few of the nearby towns.  Severe thunderstorm, tornado, and flash flood warnings are described by parts of counties, and storm tracks are described by towns in the path.  You’ll need to know both to know if you’re under the gun.  Third, be aware of the storm shelters available in places that you visit, especially places you stay overnight or for long stretches during the day, and REALLY especially if you’re camping.

If you have any questions about storm safety, storm warnings, or storm tips, throw them my way and I’ll be happy to answer!