Category Archives: Weather

Thunderstorms

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We have been having typical summer weather. It has been very hot, into the 90s most days, and humid. It’s thunderstorm weather. We have had late afternoon storms on a couple of days. They dropped only about a quarter to a third of an inch, but it was just what our new plants needed. And, fortunately, the storms have not been strong. On Monday Leah called me out to look at some clouds.

When I first saw the clouds, I told Leah it looked kind of like an anvil cloud, the classic form of a big thunderstorm. The anvil was not well defined, but there was a suggestion of flattening at the top, especially in the shaded cloud to the right. It was easier to see before I went inside to get my camera. After I took this shot, I went in and checked my weather radar app.

The pushpin is where our house is. The storms were 15 to 20 miles away, but we could just hear some thunder. These storms missed us.

It’s going to be in the 90s for the next week at least, if the forecast is accurate. We might get some rain in that time. I hope so.

Fall skies

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Fall finally arrived, chasing our later summer away. The days have been mild, the nights cool, and the sky blue.

There was some humidity in the air Saturday morning when I walked the dogs down into Texas Valley.

Since our house faces east, we can see the sun rising, but not going down. But there are still some nice sunsets, even if we can’t actually see the sun setting.

The rain been coming down

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I wouldn’t ordinarily complain about rain, but come on, now, who’ll stop the rain? On Saturday I had just finished spreading topsoil over our bare front yard, hurrying to get it done before the rain started, and then the rain started. And it came down hard, an inch and a half’s worth in a little over an hour. The result was predictable.

In case you can’t see what happened, here’s a closer shot.

The rain washed big ruts into the yard, taking away the topsoil there and washing it deep into the woods. I thought I was finished with the topsoil, but I had to order another eight scoops on Monday. On my way back from the yard where they sell the topsoil, I stopped and bought nearly a ton of lime and fertilizer in 40-pound bags. On the way back home from the store, it started raining, and it rained hard. We got about two-thirds of an inch. I don’t think it made any new ruts, but it reaffirmed the ruts that were already there. And it made the ground so soggy I couldn’t get the topsoil delivered. It will still be too wet on Tuesday, the day of this post.

Right now there is a 20 percent chance of rain for Tuesday, down from an earlier predicted 80-percent chance. That higher chance has now moved to Wednesday and Thursday. I will probably have to have the topsoil dumped onto our concrete driveway if I want it any time soon.

Of course I have to spread 40 bags of lime and 5 bags of fertilizer sometime, and then hope it doesn’t wash away.

After the storm

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Up here on the mountain we have had very little rain for almost a month. The air has been very hot and humid. Walking the dogs down to the end of the driveway is enough to soak my shirt with sweat. But we have watched on the radar as strong storms surround us but generally do not give us any rain. Last Saturday a strong storm moved across town. It was visible from our front porch, but we got no rain. After the storm, the clouds were dramatic and colorful.

These formations look almost like cumulus mammatus (although some of them might, in the imaginations of some people, look like another anatomical feature). I am not certain they would qualify as cumulus mammatus because their size seems somewhat small for that. This image was taken with my iPhone.

I took this image with my Olympus camera.

Both of these images were taken towards the east, with the setting sun illuminating the underside of the storm clouds. The sunset light reflected from the clouds gave the whole world a warm, golden glow.

I grabbed a radar image off my phone to show what seems to happen to us these days.

A strong storm was moving slowly towards us, but it split, kind of like the Red Sea, and passed us by to the north and south. The pushpin shows the location of our house. We got a slight drizzle, hardly enough to dampen the ground.

The same weather app shows an 80-percent chance of rain for Thursday, the day Saturday. But we’ve seen those percentages change as the date approaches.

Surprise snow

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We woke up Friday morning to this view out the bedroom window.

We were surprised because the Atlanta TV weathermen, who we rely on for some of our forecasts, were not tearing their hair out and running around in circles Thursday night. If there is a reasonable probability of an accumulation of snow, the Atlanta TV stations typically treat it like an invasion from Mars. Since they didn’t, we didn’t expect snow.

But we got it. It snowed all day Friday. By the time it stopped early Saturday morning, around eight inches had fallen, although not all actually accumulated on the ground.

The company I used to work for, and still do a little work for, had their Christmas party Friday night. We had planned to attend, but I was worried about two things: Lookout Mountain and Sand Mountain. The highway to Huntsville, Al, crosses both mountains, and those mountains have steep grades. At least a couple of times when I was still working in Huntsville, snow on those grades forced me to detour through Chattanooga, for a trip that lasted about eight hours instead of the normal two and a half hours. The last thing I wanted was for Leah and me to end up trapped on one of those mountains with no way off.

I took the truck down our mountain to see what conditions would be like. I made a video of the drive back up.

It wasn’t bad, but I didn’t know what to expect over in Alabama. As the day passed, the Atlanta TV stations, which broadcasted nothing but snow news all day (making up for the lack of franticness the day before), showed an expected accumulation of almost nothing to our west, where we would have to go. So we chanced it, and everything was fine.

Saturday was a day for appreciating the snow.

“I want to go outside and build a snowman!”

I took Sam and Zeke on their usual walk Saturday morning. Sam was pretty enthusiastic about the snow. I made a video of him sniffing under and around the snow. Unfortunately, I had to hold the phone vertically, so the video is not properly oriented.

Any appreciable snow accumulation is rare for Rome in December. Eight inches is very unusual. In fact, this type of snow is very rare any time in Georgia. Accumulations in the Atlanta area were even greater in some places. Damage caused by the heavy snow resulted in more than 100,000 electrical outages in the Atlanta area. Fortunately, we had no problems up on the mountain. All we had was some additional beauty plus some cold weather.