Weather!

[Ann]

Flooding in Malmö:

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

This is Pildammsparken, right next to where I live.

Sorry that the video doesn't seem to start. Maybe you'd like to look at another "video still"?

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Ann

P.S. Beyond just told me how to make these videos work. Click on these url tags.

Thanks, Beyond!

[Beyond]

Well that's a bit strange. I copied and pasted both videos to my address bar and they work just fine.

:EDIT: The youtube tags aren't working. But it works as a url tag.

[Ann]

Sven has mostly passed us by now, and things are returning to normal. But Sven left quite a bit of devastation in his tracks. Seven people were killed here in Sweden. That's a lot. Last time we had a storm here in southern Sweden, in October, no one was killed. Of course, that storm, Simone, was a girl - as you can tell from her name - while Sven was a boy and a much ruder sort. Simone didn't kill anyone, didn't flood us, and didn't dump any snow on us.

I wouldn't say she didn't snap a few trees, though. Before Simone, there was a small grove of willows not far from where I live. Simone sent several of them to willow heaven. As I passed the grove today, Sven had taken care of a few others.

I guess they'll chop the rest of the willows down.

Ann

[Beyond]

They wouldn't happen to be weeping willows, wood they

[geckzilla]

By Katherine Dinger

---

My friend posted this photo over at Facebook in a series of photos documenting the effects of the ice storm on the plant life around her home in Texas. Remarkably, its leaves remained free of ice except for the pieces which became lodged in various crevices. She said all the other plants around it were icicles. A quick search reveals that this is called the lotus effect. Useful!

[neufer]

[b][color=#0000FF]Computer graphic of a lotus leaf surface.[/color][/b]

---

My friend posted this photo over at Facebook in a series of photos documenting the effects of the ice storm on the plant life around her home in Texas. Remarkably, its leaves remained free of ice except for the pieces which became lodged in various crevices. She said all the other plants around it were icicles. A quick search reveals that this is called the lotus effect. Useful!

<<Although the self-cleaning phenomenon of the lotus was possibly known in Asia long before (reference to the lotus effect is found in the Bhagavad Gita) its mechanism was explained only in the early 1970s after the introduction of the scanning electron microscope. By the mid 1990s, Wilhelm Barthlott developed industrial products and trademarked the principle as the Lotus-Effect.>>

[Ann]

This is a bus whose driver thought it was a good idea to drive on the road, even though the road was under water. This happened in Helsingborg, some seventy kilometers or so north of where I live.

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

Ann

[BMAONE23]

Our little village in Sonoma County, Santa Rosa (pop 150,000), has been under Freeze conditions for the last several mornings.
Last night, by 11:00pm it was already 27deg F and got into the teens by morning. San Francisco was reported to be 34F, even with the marine influence. I left the Kitchen sink faucet dripping overnight but the pipes were still mostly frozen in the morning. Only a trickle passed. Here we are now at 10:30am and it is still only 31F (still below freezing)

[Chris Peterson]

First the cold drove the elk down off the mountains, and now it's driven in a big herd of pronghorn from... somewhere. We see a few, but they're more creatures of the plains. I figure there are at least 80 in this herd.

Curious animals- we call them antelope, but they're not. A bit of antelope, a bit of goat, but related to neither. In fact, not closely related to anything else on Earth. On its head, not quite horns, not quite antlers. The fastest land animal after cheetahs, and the fastest in the western hemisphere. Nobody knows for sure why they can run so fast, since they have no predators that even come close. Possibly, they evolved that speed to deal with predators that used to live here, but are now extinct. I shot this just in front of my house, and wouldn't have wanted to be any farther away. 8°F, but a wind chill putting that into negative numbers. Brrr.

[Beyond]

I thought pronghorns were strictly a plains animal. How did they ever get up the mountain to that itty-bitty patch of plains looking area by your place
Oh, weren't there fires down around the bottom a while back

[Nitpicker]

Cool pictures Chris, and I'm not talking about the weather!

[Chris Peterson]

I thought pronghorns were strictly a plains animal. How did they ever get up the mountain to that itty-bitty patch of plains looking area by your place :?:
Oh, weren't there fires down around the bottom a while back :?:

We do have them in the mountains, but we rarely see more than a few at a time. Big herds like this are very unusual.
I live just off the geological structure called South Park (yes... that South Park), which is a high altitude valley that looks very like plains and is home to many pronghorn. These may have come from there, or from south and lower, in juniper-piñon hills that are also home to larger herds. Or maybe, just a bunch of small mountain herds came together. I doubt they are here because of any fires.

[Ann]

Thanks for posting all those great pictures, Chris. I had to look up the pronghorn. Really fascinating.

Your pictures of elk surprised me. I had no idea elk could look like that. The name, elk, clearly resembles älg in Swedish, but our älg is nothing like the animals in your picture. Unless the individuals we saw were all female?

I still don't think that the female elk look all that much like a female älg.

Ann

[Chris Peterson]

Your pictures of elk surprised me. I had no idea elk could look like that.

Our "antelope" (pronghorn) aren't really antelope, our "buffalo" (bison) aren't really buffalo, and our "elk" (wapiti) aren't really elk. All these names simply come from the Europeans who first came here and pigeonholed the species they encountered according to animals they were already familiar with.

[geckzilla]

Those are moose over here, Ann.

[Chris Peterson]

Those are moose over here, Ann.

We have moose, as well. Very rare around here, they are slowly drifting in from the north. I've only encountered one once (a couple of years ago), and didn't have a camera. A handful are now seen in this county every year. The only deer species in North America larger than the elk.

[geckzilla]

We had a groundhog once that would visit during the day. But then I opened the window to try to watch it without the screen in the way and the little creature ran away and never came back.

I've never seen any wild animal larger than a raccoon here.

[Nitpicker]

I recall a magical day in Alaska in July 1999, with incredibly soft light, where I saw moose, caribou and grizzly bear, along with a rare peek at the peak of Denali, all in the space of a few hours.

My favourite, pre digital revolution ... this small scanned copy is the only electronic one I can find.

[neufer]

Click to play embedded YouTube video.

I shot this just in front of my house, and wouldn't have wanted to be any farther away. 8°F, but a wind chill putting that into negative numbers. Brrr.

-93.0ºC = -135.3ºF

[Nitpicker]

-93.0ºC = -135.3ºF

-40&deg;C = -40&deg;F ... cold in anyone's language.

[neufer]

[b][size=110]Comparison of phase diagrams of [color=#FF0000]carbon dioxide (red)[/color] and [color=#0000FF]water (blue)[/color] as a log-lin chart with phase transitions points at 1 atmosphere[/size][/b]

---

-93.0ºC = -135.3ºF

-40&deg;C = -40&deg;F ... cold in anyone's language.

But above −78.5 °C (−109.3 °F) the dry ice is sublime.

[Nitpicker]

Yet there is the risk it might become supercritical.

[neufer]

Yet there is the risk it might become supercritical.

Like Simon Cowell (Only under pressure at a lot of karaoke bars.)

[Nitpicker]

Like Simon Cowell (Only under pressure at a lot of karaoke bars.)

Where there's smoke there's Art.

[owlice]

Snow is in the forecast, scheduled to coincide with this morning's rush hour. I'm up waiting for ....oh! Just announced. Federal Government is closed. Classes are clearly cancelled for the day; I can go back to bed!