i'm a little neurotic about checking the weather. well, i walk everywhere, so i like to plan around a warmer day. for example, i did some groceries today because they were forecasting it was going to be around -8 today, and -15 all week (it was cold all last week, so i'd been planning on it).
well, sort of. a few days ago they said it was going to be cold saturday and warm sunday. then they switched it, saying it was going to be around -3 today. then, last night, they switched it to -15 today and -24 tomorrow. this morning they said it would be -8. so i said that's good enough. but it seemed warmer - sure enough it hit a high of -3 around noon (it's now -7). this is all the same forecaster.
sounds awful. they can't even get it right an hour in advance which is firmly in completely useless territory. but it's the wind. the wind we've been getting this year simply doesn't blow through here like this. i was saying something about that a while back. -40 wind chills overnight are really unheard of in this city. yet, they've become the norm this month. and it's clearly just confusing the fuck out of the weather people.
so, it's sort of fun to watch and laugh.
they've changed the long range this week at least three times over the last ten hours, and major changes, too. a few hours ago, the forecast for tomorrow was a high of -24. then -16. now -6. it'll no doubt be different in a few hours. all because they've never seen this kind of wind here before...
...which is humbling. we think of the weather and climate as something that has to do with clouds, jetstreams and greenhouse gasses and cycles itself around familiar orbits that the earth has in relation to the sun - around approximately every 365 days, and on it's axis over ~ 24 hours. sun goes up, temp goes up; sun goes down, temp goes down. on a functional level, grover could explain this: near - HOT, far - COLD.
sometimes, though, the wind will completely abolish all of that soundness, sense and logic. temperatures will drop ten or twenty degrees as the sun is rising, then bounce back by 15 overnight when the sun is down, making a complete mockery of the expected order of things.
there's some thought that solar processes have an effect on the wind patterns that develop at the north pole (only the north due to the earth's tilt, but think of it like introducing energy (here, entropy) into the system), meaning it hasn't really lost control, just the illusion of it. but that requires some calculations to understand that reach well beyond the intuitive ordering that it totally shatters.
so, here's to the wind, and it's ability to pulverize normalcy into incoherency.