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Winter in Ottawa
11-29-2016, 03:22 PM
It's definitely winter time in Ottawa.
There's enough freezing rain out there today to turn pre-salted highways into skating rinks, and the forecast is for the freezing rain to continue until noon. All school bus service has been cancelled. There are so many collisions out there that I have no clear route to get to work for a couple of hours.
We're still going ahead with the Grey Cup victory parade at noon.
I love this city. And I say that without irony or sarcasm.
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What's the weekend forecast? I've got some relatives driving up there for a wedding this weekend.
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According to http://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/on-118_metric_e.html :
Friday: chance of mixed precipitation, with temperatures near freezing
Saturday: mix of sun and cloud, with temperatures near freezing (dropping overnight)
Sunday: mix of sun and cloud, temperatures below freezing
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Ugh. No thanks. I'll stay here in Texas where it's relatively warm. :p
Really, Rob, you should try wintering down here some time. 
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Hmmmmm... I expect to have some free time in roughly eight years. (That's when I can retire with a pension; it has nothing to do with the election you just had.) Ask me then.
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If they have a winter in Texas, it will be chaos!
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But I thought the part of Texas north of Rt 66/I 40 gets the occasional dusting of snow?
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We do get a bit of snow up in the panhandle. But the beauty of the winter season here in Texas is that it's usually dry and your typical daily high doesn't drop below forty degrees (fahrenheit). Although we can get some hard freezes overnight leaving black ice on the bridges, and that when it's a good idea to stay off the roads even if you DO have a four-wheel drive.
Really, the greatest thing about Texas in Winter is heading down to Padre Island for some fishing and wading. The Gulf Coastal Current keeps the water down there a balmy eighty degrees, so even when it's forty outside there's still plenty of pleasure to be had.
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Quote:Ankhani wrote:
If they have a winter in Texas, it will be chaos!
Chaos is what occurred in Birmingham Alabama when an inch of snow came down.
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BA is leaving out the two scourges of Texas Winter. The first is the ice storm. Temperature is high enough that you get rain instead of snow, but low enough that it is freezing. Temperature starts dropping as rain falls. Rain turns to sleet and freezes where it hits the ground. In the worst case scenario, you end up with everything coated in a light layer of ice. EVERYTHING. Roads, houses, trees, cars, garbage cans... everything. Temperature floats around the high 20s for a few days, and everyone forgets how to drive.
That last bit is true of any change in Texas. Heavy rain? Flooding, houses get damaged, a few people drown, and everyone forgets how to drive. Hurricane? Flooding on the coastline, power outages, the National Guard gets called in, heavy rains, and everyone forgets how to drive. Tornado? High winds, high possibility of localized property damage, hail storms, and everyone forgets how to drive.
The second scourge is, believe it or not, grass fires. Some years, Texas is so dry that we have had grass fires in the winter. Property damage, closed roads, a few deaths, and everyone forgets... well you get the idea.
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I'm not completely unfamiliar with the concept of an ice storm, but we only get them once or twice a decade. (Or got them - who knows what'll happen with global warming?)
Grass fires... we don't get as much. We have boreal forest instead of grasslands.
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People forget because they're too stupid to live. :p
Seriously, one of the first things I warn new residents about are the low water crossings. There's a reason why we put flood gauges on these things. I know, six inches of water on the road doesn't seem like a lot, but when it's sluicing over the road at a rate of a 500 thousand liters per minute.... !!!
But really, the risks are manageable. And the weather in SOUTH Texas is a bit different from the weather in NORTH Texas. Tornadoes in SOUTH Texas are actually not common. The same with ice storms. If shit outside starts to get hairy, then try to stay indoors - it will pass soon enough. Bad weather here does NOT tend to linger. It can happen, but it is very rare.
Oh, and when was the last time we even had a tropical storm make landfall here? Seriously, it's almost humiliating. (Besides, this is why it's best to live in San Antonio - we're far enough away that even if a hurricane makes landfall in Corpus Christi, chances are it'll mostly blow itself out by the time it gets this far.)
And yes, grass fires do happen here... but after two-hundred years of dealing with them, the state's fire departments have become quite adept at it. Just report the fire and stay clear. The firefighters will handle the rest.
Oh, and let's not forget the scourge that is wrong-way drivers because (either due to drunkeness or dementia) some drivers forget that frontage roads are not always two-way... or worse, they get on the wrong damn side of the freeway. Drive careful out there, folks!
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Quote:Black Aeronaut wrote:
But really, the risks are manageable. And the weather in SOUTH Texas is a bit different from the weather in NORTH Texas. Tornadoes in SOUTH Texas are actually not common. The same with ice storms. If shit outside starts to get hairy, then try to stay indoors - it will pass soon enough. Bad weather here does NOT tend to linger. It can happen, but it is very rare.
Oh, and when was the last time we even had a tropical storm make landfall here? Seriously, it's almost humiliating. (Besides, this is why it's best to live in San Antonio - we're far enough away that even if a hurricane makes landfall in Corpus Christi, chances are it'll mostly blow itself out by the time it gets this far.)
2005. They called her Hurricane Rita. 113 deaths, including the unborn child of the Vice Chairman of my former company. His wife miscarried during the Houston evacuation.
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I've already mentioned this at least once on the forum (sorry for harping on it), but since Ebony brought it up, I was at Fort Hood (mid-Texas) during an ice storm in the mid-'90s. Two separate days, it deposited roughly half to three-quarters of an inch of ice on the door of my car (driver's-side door; my fault the second time for not parking facing the other way) which had to be chipped off before I could get into the vehicle. I grew up in Michigan, but this particular ice storm, or set of ice storms, was scary even by northern standards. When you add that most of the Texans clearly had little notion of how to drive in such weather ("...everyone forgets how to drive..."), it got terrifying. Fort Hood, a major U.S. military installation, was almost completely shut down.
Edit: apology deserved; supplied
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Quote:robkelk wrote:
I'm not completely unfamiliar with the concept of an ice storm, but we only get them once or twice a decade. (Or got them - who knows what'll happen with global warming?)
You will probably get MORE of them.The issue with global warming is that the average temperature of the PLANET is going up a few degrees, but on the LOCAL level it means that weather is getting more extreme. Heat waves get much hotter, dry spells much drier, flood muc more violent, and cold waves much colder too.
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Rita was more than ten years ago. Compare to Florida which get nailed every season. Also, pretty sure I was in Pennsylvania in 2005, so I didn't get to experience that. 
Now that ice storm, I remember that! I was living in Pflugerville when that happened an we picked up about an inch of solid, glassy-smooth ice. But that's pretty damn rare for the Austin Area.
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Winter in Ireland...
It's -2 with freezing fog.
Complete with frozen cars who haven't bothered to do more than scrape a little hole for the driver to peer through from the film of ice on the window
A Prius tiptoeing at single-digit speeds down a perfectly clear road with a steaming convoy behind it.
Multiple cars with only their headlights on. In thick fog.
Plenty with one working light, or no working brake lights.
Multiple more operating in full stealth mode with nothing on. In thick fog. Grey Audis loom out of nowhere.
Road salt eating bare metal wherever it touches. Or gritter-trucks cracking windshields.
Bald summer tyres everywhere. Wrecks at the side of the road.
Absolute pandemonium when someone finds someone elses back-end on the M50 and the whole motorway grinds to a halt, shortly followed by the entire goddamned city.
And the office building is fucking freezing because management lets the old solid mass of uninsulated concrete cool down overnight rather than keep the heat on set-back - so it refuses to warm up at all during the day. Not until it's time to leave.
And it's an Irish cold. So it's a wet cold that soaks through anything and makes you feel misereable rather than the sort of cold.
My RX8 makes beautiful contrails at speed with the greatest heater ever fitted to a car. Heated seat are a god-send. And I got out into the field at 6pm on a Friday to service a faulty heat-pump. Tripping it into reverse using an engineer's test function and putting my hands on the steaming coils for five minutes was heaven.
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Well, some freezing rain came down last night here in Welland, but it doesn't look so bad this morning. Still above freezing, but close.
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It was +6C in Ottawa yesterday. Today we managed +1C, and we're expecting -7C tonight. The next time we might be above freezing is Tuesday - maybe.
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Meanwhile, there was a ten-alarm fire in Cambridge, MA, last night, about two miles from my brother's house. Spent half the night in a panic worrying about him.
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Hope your brother's okay and still has a place to sleep tonight.
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He's fine, thankfully. Was well away from it all.
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15C out today
In mid december.
Huh
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Must be nice. We managed 2C, and don't expect to get above freezing again in the next week (which probably means we'll be below freezing until the new year).
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-13C/8F here right now in Denver.
Shoveling when I got home from work was... unpleasant, if only for that reason. There was not a lot of snow, only a few inches.
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