Category: Environment & Weather

Red Moon Rising Tonight

Ecliptophiles, get out your binoculars. The moon could be turning red again.

Or maybe orange. Or maybe a dull brown. The color is unpredictable because it depends on the amount of dust and clouds in the Earth’s atmosphere, which filters and refracts the indirect light from the sun that manages to reach the moon even during a total eclipse.

But whatever the color, this is a show worth watching when the moon rises Saturday evening in the eastern sky and is eclipsed by the Earth’s shadow. You just have to be in the right spot.

In America, that means being east of the Rockies, ideally in New England, where the sky will be darkest during the eclipse. The farther west you go, the more twilight there’ll be in the sky — but there could still be plenty to see if you start looking east after sunset. For details on how to watch, check out NASA’s guide and map. Sky and Telescope magazine offers another guide. At MrEclipse.com, you’ll find a primer on eclipses as well as photography tips.

I advise against trying the Columbus eclipse ploy, which he used in 1504 on a trip to Jamaica. Thanks to a handy almanac, he managed to extort food from the natives by threatening to make the moon disappear, and then agreeing to return it just before the eclipse ended. This tactic might frighten your children into better behavior — “See what you’ve made me do to Mr. Moon!” — but any short-term benefits would be outweighed by the shrink bills during adolescence.

TierneyLab

Best historical analogy of the day, so far

“In 1850, the fifth-biggest industry in our country was whaling, and most houses were lit by whale-oil lamps,” he said. “But as whales started to get shy or scarce and the price of whale oil drifted up, this started to elicit competition, particularly from coal-based oil and gas.” By 1859, these competitors had seized five-sixths of the whale-oil lighting market. “This was a real shock to the whalers. They never expected to run out of customers before they ran out of whales. But that’s what happened, and they were soon reduced to begging for subsidies on national-security grounds.”

Elizabeth Kolbert, quoting Amory Lovins in a profile of Lovins in the January 22, 2007, issue of The New Yorker (not currently available online).

In the Rockies, Pines Die and Bears Feel It

From today’s New York Times:

Jesse Logan retired in July as head of the beetle research unit for the United States Forest Service at the Rocky Mountain Laboratory in Utah. He is an authority on the effects of temperature on insect life cycles. That expertise has landed him smack in the middle of a debate over protecting grizzly bears.

You just never know where the study of beetles will take you.

Dr. Logan seems, in fact, to be on a collision course with the federal government, in the debate over whether to lift Endangered Species Act protections from the grizzly bears in and around Yellowstone National Park.

A foggy end to the year

Even more strange weather in the desert today. At Casa NewMexiKen at 6,000 feet it was sunny and clear beyond description. Every boulder and tree stood out on the mountains. Mt. Taylor glistened 75 miles to the west. And it got to 40°.

Below, in the city, and especially nearer the Rio Grande, it was, in many places, much of the time, a foggy day complete with frozen crystals floating in the air. This evening the fog was dense enough in places to limit visibility to a few car lengths, yet back in the foothills the brilliant clarity remains.

Odd.

Oh, and after driving through several parts of town today, I am here to tell you that much of the city got a dusting of snow compared to the avalanche we got in the heights.

Storm of the century

The official NWS airport total snowfall as of 11:26 AM was 15.6 inches. Around town the total accumulation runs from 10 to 20 inches, generally more in the Northeast Heights and near the Sandia Mountains.

The highest total in the state, so far, is 32 inches near Santa Fe.

Update at 1PM: I shoveled some a little of the driveway just now to relieve the cabin fever. I’d say 20 inches is a fair tabulation, but it was snowing enough to cover the surface as I shoveled. The snow on the ground is surprisingly light considering the temperature is now above freezing. I could hear very, very few cars passing by on nearby Tramway (a major road). In fact, the most distinct sound was a train whistle — and the tracks are about eight miles away.

This is NewMexiKen’s eighth winter in Albuquerque. It’s the first time I have ever had the snow shovel (which migrated here with me from Virginia) off its hook in the garage.

Update 3PM: The clouds have lifted enough to show some of the mountains. So beautiful. A great day to love ‘Burque. Think I’ll go shovel another 40 square feet. 😉

A record setter

The snow has gone from picturesque to inconvenient to troublesome.

Yesterday Albuquerque officially recorded 11.3 inches of the fluffy, wet stuff, a one-day record. The old record was 10.0, set in 1959. And it continues to snow. I’d say, without anything “official” to measure it with, that it’s about 18 inches total at Casa NewMexiKen. What do you think?

Snow Accumulation Saturday Morning

I’m wishing I’d stopped at the grocery store on my way home from the airport Thursday evening.

December 2006 is the snowiest month ever in Albuquerque.

Accumulation matters

About 8-9 inches of snow so far at Casa NewMexiKen according to nearby weather stations.

Snow Accumulation

The light in the house seems so weird when the skylights (all 7 of ’em) get covered like this.

(Casa NewMexiKen is 6,070 feet above sea level, about 1,000 feet higher than downtown Albuquerque.)

[Update: I-40 closed eastbound. I-25 closed north to Colorado. Airport closed. Flights out cancelled since morning. Friends and their family’s cruise departs Miami tomorrow at 4PM. Earliest possible arrival time from ABQ to Miami: 5PM. 😥 ]

The Solstice

The Solstice is Thursday evening at 5:22 PM Mountain Time (7:22 Eastern, 4:22 Pacific). The sun begins its six-month trek north at that time.

Don’t forget your science homework this week. As the sun sets Thursday, take note of its direction in relation to neighborhood landmarks — trees, other houses, water towers, what have you. Write it down, make a diagram, or take a photo. Compare and contrast with your notes from June 21st and September 23rd.

Make a Wish

The nights and early morning hours of November 17-19 mark the return of the Leonid meteor shower to the skies of Earth. Will it be worth your while to get outside and take a look? Well, that depends on which expert you listen to and where you live.

For the most part, this year’s Leonid’s display should be a pretty typical meteor shower. Just days away from New Moon, the sky will be free of moonlight so viewers should be able to see as many as 20 faint, fast-moving meteors per hour during its peak (the evening of November 17, early morning of November 18).

However, unlike a typical meteor shower, astronomers are predicting an unusual “outburst” of meteor activity late November 18 – early November 19 (the date it occurs depends on where you live).

The Planetary Society

Thanks to dangerousmeta! for the link.

Boring stuff

In case you’re keeping a chart, the highest temperature officially in Albuquerque during October was 82° on the 1st. The low was 35° on the 19th and 23rd. There was 1.70 inches of precipitation, but none in the last half of the month.

It was twice as wet, but just a fraction cooler than the average October.

Two for Tea

An article from The New York Times on the return of jaguars to New Mexico and Arizona — Gone for Decades, Jaguars Steal Back to the Southwest. The fence along the border will put an end to this nonsense.

And some background about Gershwin’s opera Porgy and Bess, which opened 71 years ago tonight — Happy Birthday, Porgy.

“Summertime” “Bess, You Is My Woman Now” “I Got Plenty o’ Nothin” “It Ain’t Necessarily So” — good stuff.

Two

A couple of items worth your time.

First, a brief blog piece from Malcolm Gladwell, “Degree of Difficulty.” Gladwell, bothered that a recent article he did for The New Yorker wasn’t appreciated as much as he would have liked, notes that “We can see all the things that someone, in a different profession than us, does. What we cannot know is the relative difficulty of those tasks.”

Next, the wonderful Peter Matthiessen writes “Inside the Endangered Arctic Refuge” for The New York Review of Books. His opening paragraph:

Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong. Everywhere fly sandhill cranes and seabirds, myriad waterfowl and shorebirds, eagles, hawks, owls, shrikes and larks and longspurs, as well as a sprinkling of far-flung birds that migrate to the Arctic slope to breed and nest from every continent on earth. Yet we Americans, its caretakers, are still debating whether or not to destroy this precious place by turning it over to the oil industry for development.

The New Yorker: The Talk of the Town

A interesting brief commentary from Elizabeth Kolbert that NewMexiKen read on the plane today. It includes this:

If you examine Bush’s record, you find that the technologies he supports are either those which were developed in the past—coal mining and oil drilling—or those which lie securely in the future: cars and buses that zip around on hydrogen. When presented with new technologies that could actually change the way Americans live in the here and now, the White House wants nothing to do with them.