By Joe Crain
As predicted at the end of last month’s article, March has been more winter than spring. On the “meteorological” first day of spring, or as the non-weather nerds amongst us refer to it, March 1st, winter was still firmly in control with the high temperatures still hanging well below the freezing point and snow dominating our forecasts. But in the second week of the month, the weather started to turn a bit. We got some hope of an actual start to spring-like conditions with temps reaching above the freezing point and even nearing the 40-degree mark for a couple of days. Our ridiculously tall snow banks had started to recede to just absurdly tall dimensions as things started to melt a bit. In my yard I like to use the three-foot-tall bird bath we have out back as a sort of snow depth gauge. The bit of melting that came in the second week of the month hadn’t reduced the depth to a point where the top of the feeder was visible. Still, I was excited that the two-foot-tall pile on top of the birdbath was significantly reduced! But then in a cruel twist of meteorological fate, the weekend that brought us an extra hour of afternoon day light, the start of Daylight-Saving Time, we had a wind driven snow storm that dumped an additional seven inches on top of my non-scientific snow depth gauge. And just as we were about to celebrate the “astronomical” first day of spring, or the “Real First Day of Spring” as us traditionalists like to refer to it, we woke to another deposit of 14 inches of snow. So now we were faced with more snow on the ground than we had at the start of March, the month with two days that claim to be the first day of Spring! In the span of three weeks, we saw more than 20 inches of fresh snow on top of the three-plus feet we still had on the ground. Every time I went out to shovel the latest storm away, I came back into the house with sore shoulders, not because the snow to be tossed was heavy but because I had to throw each shovelful above my head to get it up and out of my trenched walkways! The sides of the roads had banks plowed over my head, and while I’m not Charlie Barrows tall, at 5’8” that’s a tall snow bank.
Thankfully on the last weekend of March things started to turn warmer again and we had several days in the low 40s. I was very excited when I returned from a trip out of town for the weekend to find the top two inches of my birdbath visible above the snow cover! The “spring” sun is much higher now at its zenith, giving the sun’s rays much less atmosphere to pass through so that even on days that weren’t feeling so warm, the roof edges were dripping with snowmelt. You can really start to see the effect of this reduced solar zenith angle on the south-facing snow banks which are becoming pitted and shrunken at a rate much faster than the north-facing banks. A phenomenon that gets me excited every year at this time, because no matter the current temperature or snow depth, the astrological reality is that spring will come!
Hoping that my inner nerd might have got you doing some “Googling,” it’s Caretaker Joe At Camp.
P.S. Think Spring!
