How's the weather in your area?

[AMM]

It's actually supposed to get to into the low 40s (F) today -- the first time it's been substantially above freezing since late last month. I am so ready for spring.....

And I am so ready for another snowstorm, so I can go cross-country skiing from my front door.

<sigh>

Well, hopefully there'll be enough snow so I can go skiing Upstate on Monday (we have Jan. 18 off, Martin Luther King Day)

[Since1982]

In the (not so) fabulous Florida Keys lately, it's been 40F at night with space heaters to sleep and 76F in the daytime. Turn off all the heaters, take off the heavy nightshirt and leggings, put on a normal warm weather skirt and T-shirt, socks and leather loafers and pray for Spring.

[Gregg1100]

Just started to warm up a bit here 10degC. Snow mostly gone. The average temperature since before Xmas has been around -2 (28F )to -9degC(15 F ) at night, with daytime temps struggling to reach 0C (32F ). One place in Scotland recorded down to -16C (3.2F). The record low for this country is around -20C (0.4F), again in Scotland, apparently.
The weathermen forcast more bitterly cold conditions here till around April, but will have to wait and see on that.
Greg

[Gregg1100]

Extra to above,
This newspaper cutting was for the 7th Jan 2010

Thousands of England's schools remain closed after temperatures dropped as low as -18C overnight, causing treacherous icy conditions.

The main airports are open, but some airlines have cancelled flights following days of heavy snowfall.

Forecasters warned of dangerous travel conditions across most of the country as heavy snowfall swept through the east of England.

Up to 20,000 people have been affected by power cuts in Hampshire.

Some 3,000 people are still without power after a cable fell on the A3 near Clanfield.

Up to 5,000 homes in Sussex, Kent and Surrey were without electricity overnight after heavy snowfall affected power lines.

The BBC Weather Centre said the village of Benson in Oxfordshire had recorded the lowest temperatures overnight, at -18C (0.4F).

Resident Amanda Strickland-Taylor, a classroom assistant, said: "For some reason, we always seem to be the coldest place.




Oxfordshire village coldest place
Thousands of homes without power
Organic milk threatened by snow
Weather delays flights at Gatwick
Snow helps police catch suspects

"It's like we've got our own microclimate here.

"You could feel the change in temperature last night though.

"We keep horses nearby in Ewelme, and when we walked back at about 4pm you could actually feel the temperature drop."

A 16-year-old boy was killed and his mother seriously injured when they were hit by a lorry as they got out of their car following an accident on the A1 in North Yorkshire.

The county's fire authority said the car appeared to have gone out of control in the wintry conditions and hit the central reservation.

The Warwickshire village of Preston-on-Stour has been almost completely cut off during the past few days. Nina Harding, who runs a shop in the village, said: "We didn't have any milk or bread or coal, so we've had people going out, obviously in 4x4s, and collecting bread and milk for everybody."

Many airlines continued to report cancellations and delays to services after the snow badly affected air travel, with several airports closing for periods on Wednesday.

Budget airline easyJet cancelled about 70 flights in and out of Gatwick Airport while British Airways scrapped a number of flights with more delayed due to icy conditions at both Heathrow and Gatwick.

At Gatwick Airport there were 136 cancellations and only two planes an hour arriving.

Thousands of schools across the country remained closed.

Rescuers help snowed-in motorists

Salford City Council said all of its schools were shutting their doors again and St Helens Council on Merseyside said only one school was opening.

All schools in South Gloucestershire, North Somerset and Bath and North East Somerset were closed.

There are school closures in most other areas of the country.

Cornwall's farmers are throwing away thousands of gallons of milk because lorries cannot make it down iced-up minor roads.

The Organic Milk Suppliers Co-operative in Weston-super-Mare, Somerset, said it may have to dump 100,000 litres of organic milk because tankers were unable to get through due to the snow.

Many councils have warned that their stocks of grit are running low, with Scarborough Borough Council in North Yorkshire revealing it was using sand from the resort's beach to grit pavements in the town.

Essex County Council are having to prioritise some main routes because they're running out of salt.

One of the UK's biggest suppliers of rock salt, Cleveland Potash, said it was struggling to meet the demand for supplies.

It has asked the Department of Transport to draw up a list of customers to supply first.




A spokesman for the company, which mines at Boulby, near Saltburn by the Sea, said: "We ensured that all of the agencies and councils that we are contracted to supply had all the gritting salt that they requested to be in place at the start of the winter period.

"As these salt stocks have become depleted far more rapidly than anyone could have predicted, we are now working closely with our customers to ensure that additional supplies of salt are made available."

More of the country's major roads were passable, but forecasters warned drivers of dangerous icy conditions on untreated routes.

Eurostar services were suspended at 0830 GMT after a Eurostar train travelling from Brussels to London's Kings Cross station was delayed for an hour inside a tunnel.

The delay was due to "traction problems", a Eurotunnel spokesman said.

Southern Trains warned of "severe disruption" and Southeastern was running a revised timetable.

First Great Western was operating a reduced timetable across some of its network due to the weather.

]Then on the 13th Jan afternoon, it started snowing again, dumping another 6-8 inches deep of the stuff on us.
Greg

[nicothoe]

One cold January morning in Chicago, I went out to my car only to find it refused to start. The temperature was -17F, which is -27C. The temperature in my home town of Liverpool was 50F, a mere 70F warmer. Some days I wonder, "Why am I here????" and then the summer begins and I am happy once again.

Chicago gets the extremes of weather. Bitter cold in the winter, and hot summers, usually a couple of weeks in the 90's. The advantage of this is that I will have the opportunity to wear a variety of skirt, both short and breezy, plus long and warm

[Jack Williams]

One cold January morning in Chicago, I went out to my car only to find it refused to start. The temperature was -17F, which is -27C. The temperature in my home town of Liverpool was 50F, a mere 70F warmer. Some days I wonder, "Why am I here????" and then the summer begins and I am happy once again.

Chicago gets the extremes of weather. Bitter cold in the winter, and hot summers, usually a couple of weeks in the 90's. The advantage of this is that I will have the opportunity to wear a variety of skirt, both short and breezy, plus long and warm

That seems the norm: The bigger the land mass, the bigger the range of temperature Summer to winter. It is usually pretty turbulent around here, with a different result hourly at times!

[TomH]

I wonder how many old guys have trouble reading red???

[Since1982]

I don't have any problems reading red like this crimson red or any other red.!!

[Kris]

I wonder how many old guys have trouble reading red???

I've read that about 10% of the male population has some degree of red/green color blindness. When you add to that the various eye maladies that often develop in "old" age (like small cataracts), which tend to reduce visual acuity, the number is quite high.
Smart web and print media designers (of which there are too few) avoid foreground/background combinations with low contrast, particularly those involving red.
Those of you who don't yet have any vision problems, consider yourselves fortunate.

I for one tend to just skip over posts or web pages that are hard to read due to poor design.
One trick that sometimes helps is to select the text of interest (or "select all"). The browser then changes the background/foreground colors, and the result is often (but not always) more readable. Of course you could also copy the selected text and paste it into a text editor, but I have to be really interested in something to go to that trouble.

Kris

[Sarongman]

Temps here are hot and humid with the chance of a storm. I am looking forward to Autumn and a relief from the heat. A cyclone at Cat. 5(hurricane to U.S. colleagues) a month ago in Weatern Australia pumped enough rain into the country to give us a good drop of rain in the Eastern states and topped up our tanks.
We have a colour blindness gene in our family with it afflicting my Nephew and a late Uncle. The story my Sister tells of that Uncle was back in the 50s when he came down from the country town- where there are still no traffic lights- and, driving her to the shops, sailed straight through a red light. On being told so he replied "Just tell me when it's red darls."

[crfriend]

We have a colour blindness gene in our family with it afflicting my Nephew and a late Uncle. The story my Sister tells of that Uncle was back in the 50s when he came down from the country town- where there are still no traffic lights- and, driving her to the shops, sailed straight through a red light. On being told so he replied "Just tell me when it's red darls."

That's precisely why there's a priority effort here in the States to standardise on vertically-oriented traffic signals with the red aspect at the top of the signal frame; this allows folks with even total colour-blindness to understand what the device is indicating. Still, however, a few horizontally-oriented ones persist in some jurisdictions -- and the red aspect can be either on the left or right, which would be highly confusing to someone with R/G colour-perception problems if they didn't have prior knowledge of the area in question.

[sapphire]

OK. I do not have color blindness, but I did have difficulty reading Gregg's post. There just was not enough contrast for me to read it easily.

[r.m.anderson]

It is as clear as mud that you need Sarongman's atmospherical Australian red dust filter to
decipher the message within the hidden faded low contrast invisible red ink!
On another note - you used red because it was the only color not choosen from the font
color palette.
Excuses - excuses!
I can read it.
I don't like it.
Please - I like everything in Black & White.
Pretty Please may I have mine without the 'RED'!
Anyway $0.02 doesn't go as far as it used to - I'll get used to it.
Good thing I wasn't wearing my red kilt at the time it would be embarrassing;
my blushing would not have shown.
As Billy Mays used to say "But wait - there is more!"
Well I am not going there.
I will give it a rest.

"Kilt-On-But-Not-in-RED"
rm

[Since1982]

The terms "hurricane" and "typhoon" are regionally specific names for a strong "tropical cyclone". A tropical cyclone is the generic term for a non-frontal synoptic scale low-pressure system over tropical or sub-tropical waters with organized convection (i.e. thunderstorm activity) and definite cyclonic surface wind circulation (Holland 1993).

Tropical cyclones with maximum sustained surface winds of less than 17 m/s (34 kt, 39 mph) are called "tropical depressions" (This is not to be confused with the condition mid-latitude people get during a long, cold and grey winter wishing they could be closer to the equator ). Once the tropical cyclone reaches winds of at least 17 m/s (34 kt, 39 mph) they are typically called a "tropical storm" and assigned a name. If winds reach 33 m/s (64 kt, 74 mph)), then they are called:

"hurricane" (the North Atlantic Ocean, the Northeast Pacific Ocean east of the dateline, or the South Pacific Ocean east of 160E)
"typhoon" (the Northwest Pacific Ocean west of the dateline)
"severe tropical cyclone" (the Southwest Pacific Ocean west of 160E or Southeast Indian Ocean east of 90E)
"severe cyclonic storm" (the North Indian Ocean)
"tropical cyclone" (the Southwest Indian Ocean)
Cyclonic storms north of the equator spin counter-clockwise, and clockwise south of the equator.

[Gregg1100]

Sorry all for the red colour- just wanted to seperate the text a bit--didn't realise it was as bad as that. The offending post is now in black.
Greg