8:00 AM temp: 7
Yesterday: 38/11
Normal: 37/23
Winter evening on Big Mountain
I took the dog and the showshoes and headed up to the mountain after work. It’s a good start to the winter for the mountain. There’s 50 inches of snow at the summit, and a week of cold weather ahead. The snow making machines were running full blast today. Opening day is Dec. 7, so we locals can tromp all over the mountain until then.
Somebody loves the snow
8:00 AM temp: 39
Yesterday: 52/22
Normal: 55/31
Spring visitors
The deer are back. And so am I, after travels south to find the sun. The grass is starting to green up, but there is snow in the hills and the forecast calls for an inch or two of snow here in the valley today. The fluctuations of spring.
There is something comforting about watching the ebb and flow of the seasons. It feels eternal, timeless, certain. Yet, this is an illusion. The earth bears the marks of historic variations in climate, from ice ages to warmer periods. But no change has occurred as rapidly as the one that we are currently in the early stages of. What will spring look like here in 10 years?
8:00 AM temp: 30
Yesterday: 44/16
Normal: 47/26
A February morning on the mountain
Despite the mild winter, the local ski hill has had a pretty good snow year. As of today, Whitefish Mountain Resort, formerly known as The Big Mountain, has a snowpack of 112 inches (285 cm) at the summit (elevation 6817 ft or 2078 m), and 30 inches (77 cm) at the village area (elevation 4464 ft or 1361 m). That’s a little less at the bottom of the hill than in recent years, but very respectable at the summit.
Most of the lifts and ski runs are on south-facing slopes, which may make the area particularly vulnerable to warming temperatures in coming years. Fingers crossed that we have many more winters of skiing there.
8:00 AM temp: 45
Yesterday: 54/30
Normal: 45/25
For Tess it’s swimming season again. For the rest of us…well, we’ll wait.
The ice by City Beach shrank noticeably the past couple days, but hasn’t broken up yet. Usually the Whitefish Lake Institute has a fundraiser where they suspend a large rock above the ice and people guess which day in the spring the ice will melt enough that the rock falls into the water. Typically that day is in April, but that part of the lake never froze this year.
8:00 AM temp: 37
Yesterday: 36/27
Normal: 43/26
A March 5 article in The Missoulian had an article by registered nurse Beth Schenk about the effects of climate change on human health. A factoid that caught my attention: Montana has warmed an average of 1.5 to 1.7 degrees F over the past century. Schenk cites NOAA as the source for this data.
I have been digging around various web sites associated with NOAA and the National Weather Service, looking for this type of data. Yikes, there is a complex, not always user-friendly tangle of products and data out there. While wandering through the climate cyber-wilderness, I came across some graphs from the National Weather Service that are a good visual representation of recent local temperatures compared to normal.
The first chart shows at a glance that there is a whole lot more red than blue, meaning a whole lot more temps above normal. The really interesting piece of information is in the second chart: the green line shows the mean difference from normal is 1.73 C. That’s 3.1 F warmer mean temps for the past month (Feb 11-March 11).
8:00 AM temp: 30
Yesterday: 49/27
Normal: 44/24
It’s snowing now (11 AM) but is supposed to turn to rain this afternoon and through tomorrow. Ugh. Have I mentioned that March is my least favorite month here?
There are big chunks of ice floating in the lake today. Presumably they broke off from the sheet of ice covering the City Beach area and floated out into the lake. I got out the telescope to take a look at some gulls standing on a piece of floating ice across the lake. There is definitely more bird activity on the water the last week or two.
No pretty pix to post today, but I added some graphs to the Monthly temps page. The one for this winter is interesting, so I’ll post it here as well.
8:00 AM temp: 33
Yesterday: 47/21
Normal: 43/23
Cris settles in for lunch, looking into Glacier National Park at the Livingston Range
Tracks
It was a bluebird day Saturday and we were dazzled and humbled by the peaks of the Livingston Range as they strutted their stuff.
As usual there is a lot more snow in the North Fork than at home. Taking skis off and taking a step landed you thigh-deep in snow in a hurry.
The snow depth seemed typical for this time of year. I checked the snowpack data for Montana, compiled by the Natural Resources Conservation Service. They don’t have a data collection site for the North Fork of the Flathead River, but they do collect data for the Flathead River basin as a whole, which on March 10 was spot on at 100% of median for moisture in the snowpack (snow water equivalent).
We saw some interesting tracks winding through the meadows. My guess is two mountain lions. There’s an intermittent straight line, which I’m guessing is a tail dragging. Anyone else have a theory?
Snowpack research team
8:00 AM temp: 32
Last 24: 35/32
New snow March 7 2013
In addition to the hard ice covering the bay at City Beach, there are patches of a thin slush on the lake this morning. The forecast high is 39, so the slushy patches will probably disappear by afternoon. There have been other similar days this winter. Looks like that’s as close to ice as most of the lake will come this year.
A new snow is always beautiful, as is the early morning blue light of such wintry days. We always have a lot of gray weather here in the winter, but it feels to me like this winter has been particularly gray. There is sun in the forecast the next couple days…I hunger for it.
The glaciers in Glacier National Park have been shrinking since about 1850, the end of the Little Ice Age. When the area was established as a national park in 1910, there were 150 glaciers. Today, there are 25, and these are expected to disappear entirely by 2030.
Glaciers have been present in this landscape for 7,000 years, so we are witnessing the end of an ecological era.
As someone who has lived near the park and hiked its trails for 25 years, this prospect causes a lurch in my gut. Two USGS scientists, Dan Fagre and Lisa McKeon, created an exhibit about the disappearing glaciers called “Losing a Legacy.” That name captures the sadness many feel about the extinction of these ice fields. But, as depressing as the idea of a Glacier-Less National Park is, that is only the beginning.
As a park naturalist explained, once the glaciers are gone, the entire ecosystem will change. The bright turquoise color of glacial lakes, caused by light reflecting off the silt, or “glacial flour,” created as the glaciers grind against the rock, will eventually fade once the supply of silt dwindles. Without a constant flow of water from glaciers through the summer, vegetation will change, including those gorgeous green subalpine meadows filled with wildflowers. As the vegetation changes, wildlife will change its patterns and follow its food sources. Forests will become drier, and more frequent and more intense wildfires are expected.
No one knows what Glacier National Park will look like in 50 years, or 100. But Fagre and McKeon of the USGS have done a great job capturing what the change of the past 100 years looks like. The images above from their web site (http://www.nrmsc.usgs.gov/repeatphoto/overview.htm) look down on one of my favorite hiking destinations, Grinnell Glacier.
Below are photos I took at Grinnell Glacier in 2009. They show a ground-level view of the ice-melt lake, the glacier, and the striated rocks visible in the 2012 photo above.
Grinnell Glacier and ice-melt lake 2009
Striated rocks where Grinnell Glacier has receded, 2009
8:00 AM temp: 19
Last 24 min/max: 19/38
Clear and cold this morning. Just the way we like winter.
One of the bald eagles was back this morning. We see them fly around from time to time, but usually they like to perch in some tall larch trees near the outlet to Whitefish River, not in our neighborhood. We did some exploring and found the attractant: the carcass of a young deer down by the railroad tracks.
Current temp: 35
This morning’s viewing was highlighted by two bald eagles
The binoculars are always handy on the window sill. It amazes me how much there is to see out there when I take the time to watch, and how changeable it is. Sometimes in the morning I drag a stool right up in front of the window. Today I was watching the early light interact with a rapidly moving snow squall when a bald eagle swooped
Bald Eagle
into view. As frequently happens, it was closely followed by several squawking crows. I wondered why crows harass eagles, and so I googled it. Apparently crows target a variety of predatory birds. The answer as to why is not simple, but this page gives a good account if you’re curious: Why Don’t Hawks Fight Back?.
The eagle came and went a few times, along with its escort of crows, and eventually a second bald eagle came along and perched in another nearby tree.
Whitefish Lake is still in good shape in terms of water quality, although studies indicate that it has been gradually degrading (a process known as cultural eutrophication) over the past decades. Lake trout, whitefish, pike, a few westslope cutthroat trout, and probably other species of fish are found in the lake…good eating if you’re an eagle.
Monthly weather summary for Whitefish, MT, for Feb. 2013 from NOAA:
Mean temp for the month: 32.1
Normal: 27.1
Departure from normal: 5
That’s 5. Crikey!
Current temp: 33
Looking out the living room window this morning at the mostly unfrozen lake
Usually we’d be skiing on the lake this time of year, and people crazier and more patient than me would be ice fishing. But, for the first time anyone around here can remember, the lake is too liquid to support humanoids of any kind. We’ve been watching out the living room window since early January, which is around the time the freeze usually occurs. Steve, who loves to skate on “wild ice,” tries to catch the short window after the ice forms and before the snow is too deep for skates to push through. Now in March, with only the bay around City Beach sporting any respectable covering of ice, we have to admit we are watching a scary kind of history unfold.
By any local standards, it’s been a mild winter. It didn’t dip below zero even once, and there was only a two-week period in January where the temperature stayed below freezing 24 hours a day. Most of the winter it’s been popping up into melting territory during the day, transforming the packed snow on the roads into a thick crust of…hey…ICE…
Backyard Climate Report 