But at the same time, people will excuse what may be dumb decisions for what are clearly dumb reasons. Here in Minnesota, as I write this, we are expecting a significant snowstorm. This is the sort of storm that, I think, reasonably makes one question whether or not to change one’s plans. Does one really want to go across town for a few hours then back during the storm of the century? But a snowstorm maybe an inconvenience, and for some, it is better to be in denial of inconveniences.

So a couple of days ago I said to someone who I know has plans for Christmas day, “You may have to skip your plans, with this snowstorm coming. I hear there may be a foot or so of snow.”

The response: “There shouldn’t be a problem. They had 20 inches in D.C. We’ll be fine.”

Huh. So does this mean that if they had 40 inches in D.C. that we would be okay with, say, 34 inches? Interesting.

Then, the next day, as the storm we are about to have was getting closer and started to look like it might be even more severe than earlier thought, I said to a different person, who has Christmas Eve and Christmas plans, “So, you may have to cancel your plans. There’s a big storm coming.”

“Yeah, but there shouldn’t be a problem. I hear some of it is going to be sleet. The more sleet, the less snow.”

Huh. So, instead of fluffy snow, we could get ice. And the sleet is going to fall, but in Iowa. So we could have two feet of snow with 25-foot drifts, and as long as its sleeting in Iowa, we’re okay?

Now, something you must understand is that here in Minnesota, we don’t get much snow. Minnesotans THINK they get lots of snow, because Minnesota is thought of as a wintry state. But the snowfall here is moderate, not great, in a typical year. What we do get here is wind and cold. But not so much snow.

In fact, if Minnesota were snowy, and Minnesotans could handle that, it would be hard to explain the 400 or so accidents that happen on the Twin Cities highways every time it snows (more for the first snow of the season).

But there was this one storm that everyone remembers. The day the sky fell on Minnesota. It was Halloween of 1991, and between one and three feet of snow fell in the impacted areas. The storm killed 22 people. Whenever the issue of snow comes up, the Minnesotans in the room wait patiently for the opportunity to mention the Halloween storm. It is as much part of the Minnesota Mythology as the Virgin Birth is of Christian Mythology. The Halloween storm.

So today, some people were talking about the storm.

“We could get quite a wallop from this storm that’s coming,” said one person.

“Yeah, might have to cancel Christmas!” added another.

“Right, like that’s going to happen,” noted a third.

“Nothing like the Halloween storm, that’s for sure,” said the first.

“Oh, yeah, I remember that one…” said the second.

“Hey, we’re Minnesotans! We can handle a little snow!” said the first.

“You betcha,” said the third.

“Oh, listen, the weather report is on the radio.”

” …the 46 to 60 hour long snow storm may turn out to be similar to the Halloween storm of 1991…”

“Oh…” said they all.

Pale faces became paler. You could hear the ticking in the heads. People thinking about their plans.

So, I’m going to go to the grocery store and stock up on supplies. Then we’re going to spend the next couple of days watching the baby burp and stuff.

Merry Christmas.

Such are a few of the things people say about the weather. Of special interest to me tonight, as our region is engulfed in a newsworthy blizzard, is the idea that “these days” have less snow than “those days”…according to every one of every age of every region that gets snow.

Have you ever thought this? Have you ever heard this said? If you live in a region that gets snow in a regular basis, and this does not remind you of several conversations you’ve had, then you must be really focused on something because you have not been paying attention.

But is it true? Were winters “those days” more snowy than winters “these days”?

Please keep in mind that none of this applies if you spent key parts of your childhood living in a different part of the country. Like me. Since I moved to Minnesota, winters here have perplexed be somewhat. I’m from the Northeast. As far as I can tell, Minnesota has had exactly two blizzards. One was on Armistice Day in the year 1940 (16.7 inches in the Twin Cities but over 2 feet to the north and 20 foot drifts in Wilmer, 49 dead), the other on Halloween in the year 1991 (37 inches in Duluth, 22 dead). Both involved heavy snow, lots of wind, and other complications (like time of year, time of day, and wet or icy conditions). All the rest of those “blizzards”…nothing more than flurries by Yankee standards! Nonetheless, Minnesotans love their snow, they think they have a lot of snow, and Minnesotans of all ages wax nostalgic about the time, “back then,” when they were around five to fifteen years of age, that there were many, many, many very large snow storms every winter.

So what is the truth about Minnesota weather? How different was your childhood from the present? How do previous Decembers compare to the current one, which has been pretty much devoid of snow until the “blizzard” that is raging outside my window now, laying down many tenths of inches of snow and causing hundreds of Minnesota drivers to spin off the roads?

Well, I assure you that this has more to do with your psychology than with any climate-based realities. Chances are you think you had more snow as a kid because of two effects; 1) You were shorter. The snow seemed deeper. Well, it was deeper, relatively…and 2) You have conflated several different years, so you are thinking of many snow storms that actually happened over a period of several years as having happened in one year, and thinking of that year as typical. These two effects combined result in your climatological memory of many deep snow falls on a regular basis when you were a kid. But chances are, it never happened.

It is possible that it did happen. It is possible that you remember a few years that happened to have a lot of snow falls, and a lot of them were heavy. We can investigate that. But first, you need to do something. You need to lay down the facts of what you think is true, prior to looking at the data. So, here’s three questions I have for you:

1) How many inches fall before you can call a storm a large snowstorm? Three? (That seems kind of wimpy.) Four? (Really? Four? Seriously?) How about six. Six inches or more is “a lot of snow.” OK, that is just a suggestion. You pick whatever number you want. Write it down. I’m going with six.

2) How many snowfalls of that size per year is “a lot of snow” or “snow like I remember it” or whatever. You have most snow falling during December, January, February, March. So, over four months how many snow falls of the size you think is “a lot of snow” seem, according to your memory, to have fallen? One per month for a total of four? Huh. You think that’s a lot? Does not sound like a lot. How about two per month. That’s not many, but it adds up. Three might be too many. That would give you 12. Maybe you’d pick ten. Eight to ten snow falls over 6 inches in a given season (including the aforementioned four months as well as October, November and April, just in case). If you picked these numbers, your idealized Wayback Winter would have had a minimum of eight storms of six inches each. Maybe those are your numbers. Maybe you’ve got different numbers.

Whatever. Write it down.

3) How much snow was on the ground in December in your idealized Wayback Winter? Total. If there were two big storms, that could have put 12 inches on the ground by the end of the month. That sounds like a lot, but maybe that’s what you think. Maybe you’ll be conservative and say something like six. Six inches of snow fallen from the sky in the month of December, unmelted. Or some other number? Whatever. Write it down. I’m going with six inches.

OK, let’s look at the facts. The following data are for the Twin Cities region of Minnesota.

How much snow falls per month? Is March really the snowiest month?

March is not the snowiest month. There are a lot of ways to look at this, but one source suggests
that the snowiest month is January, with March the second snowiest. After that, it’s December (third snowiest), February, November, April, then only trace amounts in some of the other months.

How many storms of X inches do we get per year?

Let’s say you were born in 1984 and lived in the Twin Cities since then. You imagine that winters were snowier “back then” when you were little. Given the above discussion, you’ve decided that a “snowy winter” meant six inches were on the ground at the end of December and a total of six storms of five inches or more happened during the entire winter season. Notice that your estimate has become more conservative than what you made above, because you are staring to learn that I rarely write blog posts that confirm your preconceptions, even when I’ve tricked you into having a particular preconception.

Anyway, this would all be in contrast to “these days” when we seem to have vast periods of time with no snow at all, bare exposed ground through much of December, and hardly any big storms.

So, let’s contrast “these days” (say, 2005, 2006, 2007 and 2008) with “those days” (say, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990).

Here’s the numbers. For “these days” there were no six-inch-plus storms in 2008, and only one each in 2005, 2006, and 2007. Pitiful. The occurrence of five-inch-plus storms was four, three, one and one; the occurrence of four-inch-plus storms was four, three, four and one. In other words, the total number of storms per year that are six inches or more currently is fewer than one on average, and if we drop our standards to four-inch storms, the average number per year goes up to a pitiful three. Wow that’s way less than our memory, which is something like six storms of five inches or more.

Now lets compare “these days” to “those days” using the aforementioned years.

The number of six-inch storms in 1987, 1988, 1989 and 1990 were zero, one, two and zero. That is the same as “these days” in that the average number of six-inch storms then and now is 0.75 per year. When we look at five- and four-inch storms, it’s worse… the total number of each type of storm is less during “those days” than during “these days.”

So, given this particular comparison, the idea that there was more snow…more storms and more snow in at least some of those storms…is wrong. That is a meteorologically reconstructed memory. Which is why we use science, and not culture, to characterize and study the weather!

Indeed, the total number of storms for these four-year periods is roughly what some of your reconstructed memories of the past could have attributed to a single year.

But wait, I could be making this up! I could have picked years that happen to be lean from the past. Why DID I pick those years anyway? Well, I’ll tell you. Those are the years that would have pertained to a particular person I was talking to about this the other day. But it is true that different years could give different results.

It turns out that if I had shifted the “back then” years by one, to include 1991, then the year of the great Halloween Blizzard would have been included. That year included several large storms, not just the Halloween storm. However, if I re-calculate the averages over four years including 1991 and dropping 1987, those averages become more like “these days” but do not significantly exceed them. If the Halloween Storm is part of your childhood memory, that does not mean that winters were generally snowier “back then”…but that parturition year would be a source of memories of big storms and more storms that you could then use to fill in the other years that are actually rather pitiful in snow storm frequency and snow storm amounts.

If you still don’t believe me, you can do this experiment. Before looking at the data, if you are a Minnesota resident from around the Twin Cities, pick the four or five years that would best represent your youthful memories. Then, go here and find those years and compare. Go down to the part of the web page with all the years in a big table. Click on each of the years from your youth and inspect the data. If you find a youth with a lot more snow storms and a lot more snow per storm, report back, we want to know!!!

Was December snowier back then?

Not according to the data I obtained in the comparison outlined above. The average number of inches on the ground at the end of December for the “these days” period and the “back then” period is the same. Four.

Go figure.

The reason people think that Robin Red Breast is a sign of spring is that we believe that robins fly south for the winter and north for the summer, so when we see them, it must be getting near summer. The fact that many robins don’t migrate at all, but simply become reclusive for the winter, is not widely known. The fact that when they do migrate, they don’t necessarily migrate to a warm, sunny southern climate, but rather to a place east, west, south or maybe occasionally north, where they can be more easily reclusive, as also not widely known.

But none of that matters. What matters is that the robins remind us that it is time to switch to Summer Birdwatching Mode in a couple of months, so we should start getting ready now.

Here is the To Do list for summer birdwatching mode:

1. Look for some snowy owls. If summer is coming, this is your last chance to see them.
2. Make sure you know where the backup and extra binoculars are. The main binoculars are, of course, next to the window.
3. Go through the bird books to decide which ones to bring to the cabin this year.
4. Go buy a new bird book.
5. Check the notebook from last year and see whether you need a new one.
6. Think of something new to try this year. A recording of the loons? A close up of the eagles?
7. Discuss bird-feeding strategy with rest of family.

This year, we should have a second-year eagle fledgling over by the marshy bay, and we hope the loons manage a chick this year (last year they did not). If we time things right, we might be able to intercept the tundra swan migration, as we did two years ago. And with a little luck…if we keep an eye on the web-based data and perhaps change our routes a little…

…whooping cranes.

This was a simple assignment, really.  Drive to Lakeville, examine a car for flood damage and send an estimate to the insurance company.  It was a car that had been transported from East Grand Forks, Minnesota to Lakeville.  It was owned by a married couple with two kids, people evacuated when the Red River crested nearly five feet higher than estimated and swamped the entire city of East Grand Forks.  People who were refugees of the 1997 flood.

I watched the flood news on TV.  The Red River of the North wrested control from human attempts to subdue it.  It called out “This is MY valley, and I will have my way with it this year.”  I had not seen such a flood in all of the time I live in the Red River Valley.  The flood of 1979 was close.

In 1979, I was preparing to graduate from high school, and I was living in Crookston. The Red Lake River flows through Crookston towards the Red River in Grand Forks, North Dakota.  When the Red Lake River crested, I helped with piling sandbags and saving peoples’ homes in Crookston.  When that was done, I joined a crew of my fellow high school seniors and drove to Grand Forks to help out over there, where the water was still rising.

We worked through the night in the south side of Grand Forks, piling sandbags in the rain.  We were sent to a location in a wealthy neighborhood, piling sandbags in a protective ring around the home of a rich family.  They didn’t come out to say, “Hi,” or, “Thanks.”   We could see them inside drinking highballs.  I was of legal age and wanted one.  None were offered.

We arrived back in Crookston in time to shower and get ready for school.  We had worked among thousands of volunteers from the University of North Dakota and the Grand Forks Air Force Base.  We felt good that we had saved people’s homes and properties.

After the threat to Grand Forks was fended off, the thanks via the letters section of the Grand Forks Herald were many.  People were grateful, and we appreciated their kind words and their praise.  There was one letter writer, though, who made me particularly upset and angry, and trust me, this was not my larger experience of the people of Grand Forks. From memory:

When the sandbaggers came, there were all kinds of riffraff and especially blacks that came into our yards.  I wish I hadn’t had to put up with that.  I would rather that they had let my house flood than have blacks and long-haired college kids on my property.

That has stuck with me for thirty years, along with the question of whether or not it was written by the homeowners who watched us while they were drinking their highballs.

The 1997 flood was a much worse flood.  In 1997, the sandbagging was not enough to save Grand Forks.  The river rose higher than it had been since 1826.  Downtown Grand Forks was destroyed by explosions and fire that added on to the damage caused by the water.  The Grand Forks Herald published every day thanks to the printing presses of the St. Paul Pioneer Press, and each day I saw the devastation so far away.

This time, I wasn’t there to help out.  Hundreds of people were heading north to Grand Forks to help, but I was unable to get away from work.  One of my coworkers, who was in the National Guard, was called up to help in the emergency.  I could only watch on TV and call my parents to see whether the Red River had widened to reach Hallock.  They assured me it hadn’t.  Yet.

So I felt helpless as people were evacuated from Grand Forks and East Grand Forks.  The local TV stations carried stories of cattle stranded in flowing water, unable to reach higher ground.  Some cattle were frozen standing in place as the floodwaters froze at night.

***

This was a simple assignment.  I worked for an independent auto damage appraisal company, writing estimates for auto repair.  My boss’s guidelines were clear.  If the floodwaters had reached the bottom of the seat, the car would be declared a total loss.  I didn’t need to continue to write the estimate up until the damage reached 70% of the value of the car.  I would only need to note the level of water damage.

The reason is simple.  The electronic control module, the CPU for all of a car’s computer-controlled functions, doesn’t show immediate effects of corrosion.  A flood-damaged car wouldn’t be visibly corroded, but since the ECM can’t be cleaned, the corrosion from floodwater would continue to “eat” at the electronics until they no longer functioned.  A car with such damage can run just fine until it stops.  This could happen on a freeway, while passing a big truck.  People could die.  My company didn’t want to be held liable for the deaths in such a scenario.  The policy was firm.

I contacted the owners of the car and set an appointment for the next day.  I arrived at the house where they were temporarily staying, and met the woman who owned the car.  She was trying to keep a brave face, but I could see the pain in her eyes as she smiled and thanked me for the appraisal.  I told her of my own roots in Grand Forks, and she told me how much it hurt her to have to leave.  I was getting a little verklempt myself.  I took my pictures of the damage and went back to the office.

A major contributor to the flood in 1997 was an early thaw.  Water was standing in pools in the fields when a major blizzard hit the Red River Valley. The pools froze under the snow.  As a second thaw hit, the water couldn’t drain down through the fields.  It flowed directly to the river, leading to a rapid rise.  Since the river runs north, it flows towards a still-frozen section, which causes the water to back up.  The river widens.  Dikes built to protect the towns along the river cause the flow to run faster toward unyielding ice.  The river backs up and widens even more.  The loss of wetlands speeds up the runoff towards the river.  The river widens even more.

Why are people so crazy as to build along a river that can flood so badly?  It’s the soil.  The soil is fantastic farmland.  It is a loamy clay.  Sugarbeets, potatoes, wheat, barley, sunflowers, oats, sorghum, rapeseed, flax, barley.  That’s why people stay in the Red River Valley.  But it has a price, and occasionally it demands repayment in the form of a flood.

The Natiomal Weather Service is looking at conditions in the Red River Valley and is predicting another major flood for 2009.  Fargoans are filling sandbags today, as I write this.  They can’t lay them until snow and ice have melted.  When I was driving through Fargo this last week, I noticed that they still have a great deal of snow on the ground, with ice beneath the snow.  This means possible rapid runoff.

When I see a story like this one in the Grand Forks Herald, I think of my simple assignment twelve years ago. I uploaded a file and the pictures.  Following my boss’s instructions, I had simply noted “Total Loss. Water above the bottom of the seat.  No further estimate required per guidelines.”

The adjuster, my client, called and asked for the detailed estimate.  I argued with him and explained the policy.  He wanted an estimate that showed 70% damage.  I told him it wasn’t necessary. My boss backed me up, and the adjuster relented and agreed that the car should be settled as a total loss.  Then I did something that is technically unethical, but the right thing to do.  I called the owners of the vehicle and told them how to negotiate for the maximum settlement of a total loss for their vehicle.

I did it because the adjuster was a jerk to me.  I did it because I had been unable to go to Grand Forks to help sandbag.  I did it because the highball drinkers and the letter writer who hated that blacks and long-haired college students had been in his yard are anomalies in Grand Forks.  I sincerely hope that Grand Forks, and indeed all of the Red River Valley from Wahpeton to Winnipeg, fare well and avoid a major flood in 2009.

Now, the Red River flows north into Lake Winnipeg, which ultimately links to Hudson Bay. It forms the border between North Dakota and Minnesota, passing by Fargo (the very same Fargo that had nothing to do with the Coen brothers’ film of the same name). This region gets a lot of snow some years, and when there is a lot of snow and a quick warm-up in the spring, the river carries quite a bit of extra water. This happens often enough that it is rarely a surprise but nothing close to every year. The flooding, in turn, often causes a great deal of property damage and threatens people’s well being.

We are now seeing thousands of people loading up tens of thousands of sandbags to produce miles of instant levee in the hopes of keeping the river back.

You would expect that if a river floods like this now and then, either people would not live in the flood zones, or the river would be capable of carrying more water. Well, both of those are true, and both of those are in process.

On the people side: People have lived in this valley for about 10,000 years (one of the oldest human skeletons in North America is from a nearby site), and it is almost certain that most of those people, most of the time, knew to avoid the flood zones in the spring. But more recently, different people showed up and they had less experience here. They built towns and eventually cities in the flood plain. Then they got flooded but had already built homes and buildings and roads and stuff. So they rebuilt some things, and in other cases moved, and have slowly improved anti-flooding technologies. Over time, the process of the people of the Red River Valley getting out of the way (and to a smaller extent, adapting to or diverting the floods) will be complete. This will probably take another 100 years. So, that process will have been about a two-century-long process, or about ten generations.

Which would be remarkably fast for humans.

On the river side of it, the river is actually moving an incredible amount of water in an incredibly short time considering that it is essentially flowing upstream. Well, okay, technically it is not really flowing upstream (that would be impossible), but the giant river channel that the Red River flows in is not carved into the landscape to move water north. It is carved into the landscape to move water south. But over the last days of its flow in ancient times (in geological terms, so maybe decades? centuries?), the giant Warren River slowed down its flow and the river channel filled with sediment and clogged up. Whatever rivers are now flowing up (the Red) or down (the Minnesota) this channel of the once greatest river ever are tiny trickles running in irrelevant directions on the top of this sediment.

In other words, the Red River, though it flows in an ancient channel, is pretty much a brand new river on a brand new landscape. In no time at all, the Red River will cut its channel clear of sediment and start eroding into the parent rock, and it will eventually form a deep and wide channel that will easily contain any amount of snow melt.

I’m guessing about ten thousand years. Maybe twenty. But not more than twenty five, anyway.

I can see it in their eyes and hear it in their visceral vocalizations. Like on one of those days when you get to work and it’s 20 something, nice and warm and sunny, nice and bright, and you figure spring is around the corner. Then you spend the day inside and when you leave, heading for your car or the train or the bus, a little piece of your limbic system remembers that it was warming up that morning, and your constitution is expecting it to be just around or above freezing.

But while you were inside and not paying attention, a Clipper came down from the Canadian Rockies, dusting the landscape with a thin layer of ice shavings (vaguely resembling snow), and the temperature dropped to 16 below zero. And it’s windy.

That’s when you get the little grunt.

So this time of year, I like to play word games with the weather, making up some factual statement of encouragement, then I tell it to the people I meet that day.

Like: “Starting in two weeks from now, the average maximum temperature historically stays above freezing!”

Or: “In just under a month, during years in the top 10 percent of warmth, we can expect three out of five days to stay entirely above freezing, even at night!”

Or my favorite, to use some time in late February: “Even though, based on all available data, only half the snow we get each year has not fallen yet, well, maybe that won’t happen this year!?!?”

These statements are of course meaningless, for several reasons. For one thing, nobody can really understand them, or if you do get your head around them, you can’t really use the information. For another thing, there are cold years and there are warm years, and that matters. These statements are based on long-term averages. Finally, with global climate change, the historical data are pretty much useless anyway.

But mostly these statements are meaningless because the audience is simply not receptive to them. This time of year—really, running from early March through early May—Minnesotans shut down the part of their cerebral cortex that thinks about the weather. This is because if they did not, they would go insane. I’m pretty sure this is a genetic, heritable condition that was shaped by decades of weather-induced suicide. No kidding. Every local Euro-American family that I know, where great-grandparents or earlier were the settlers, has one or more stories of suicide from back in those early generations. Not so much now, but back then it was happening all the time. It was the weather. Native American people presumably worked this out somewhat earlier in historic time.

So you cope and keep that part of your brain on “off.”

Then spring will happen so fast you won’t see it. Spring is so fast here there is no time for the black flies to breed, which is why we don’t have a black fly season across most of this state. Spring happens so fast here, Spring Break is only one afternoon long. Spring happens so fast here we call it “sprung.” I could go on.

Then we celebrate Fourth of July, post-season rates at the resorts start in August (I kid you not), and then we fall quickly into winter. That’s why they call it “fall.” If you weren’t paying attention, because the weather-wondering region of the brain shut down a little too long this year, you could just miss it.

Don’t miss it.