It's been a mean winter here in Savannah. It gets warm - balmy even - so much so that plants start to leaf out and bloom. Then it plunges below freezing and stays there just long enough for the tender shoots and flowers to freeze. Rinse (with rain), repeat. As tough as it has been on plants, bodies haven't fared much better. The warm-cold seesaw has made even the strongest consititutions cry uncle and reach for the vitamin C. I asked an expert why.
"Big John" Wetherbee is a meteorolgist for WTOC in Savannah. His weather report caught my eye, because he mentioned that we are in a "neutral" weather pattern this year. I wanted to know more, and he kindly agreed to answer some questions via email:
Q: You wrote that the weather temperature swings we are experiencing are caused by a "neutral" pattern, that is, neither La Nina or El Nino. What is a "neutral" pattern? What causes it? Why does it make the weather swing so wildly?
A: In an EL NINO, the global pattern drives moisture into the southern storm track. It’s a wet pattern for Georgia and tends to be “cool”, but not cold. LA NINA drives the storm track way north, blocking all cold air into Canada. That’s a warm winter for us. And in “neutral” phase, there’s no defined track. So cold air, which is much more dense (or heavier) can “ooze” as far south as it wants. That’s the frigid part of this winter. AND as that dense air modifies, warm air rushes into place. That’s the mild part of this winter. So the ABSENCE of a defined global pattern allows the season to ride the roller coaster UP and DOWN.
And we wish we knew what causes it. Theories include underwater volcanic activity, abnormal cooling of the Arctic waters in the summer, and aliens (I’m kidding about the aliens). We really don’t know, but I do know there are 16 long-term projects now in the field trying to find those answers.
Q: This weather seems unusual. Generally, how often are there neutral years? Is this a particularly "strong" one?
A: Not unusual at all, just perhaps “more defined” this season, meaning mild and cold are right next to each other, so we notice it more. Consider this: during our winter season (Dec-Feb), we “normally” record six records a season. This year so far, just two. So this is not that unusual. The extremes of EL NINO and LA NINA are the extremes.
Q: How might this pattern affect us the rest of the year? What kind of impact might it have on the drought in Georgia?
A: Actually, we are hoping this will help Georgia’s drought. With EL NINO, the track tends to be very defined and very stable. That means the same areas get all the rain (and that has not been Georgia). LA NINA is a drier pattern in general, and more tornadoes. On our roller coaster, more general storms tend to form in the temperature gradients and that means a better chance of rain (and not so much severe either…).
Q: Is this pattern affecting the entire US? The world? What kind of affect is it having elsewhere?
A: Yep, global weather pattern. And the effects tend to be very predictable except during “neutral” episodes.
Q: What is the weather cycle "year"? When does this cycle end, and another begin? Is it possible to predict what the next cycle will be? If so, what should we look forward to?
A: We’d like to have the answer to that. EL NINO events tend to last eleven to eighteen months and run in a seven-to-ten year cycles. And EL NINOS are the only episodes we can forecast, so the other options fill-in-the-blanks. PLUS “neutral” events do not necessarily follow EL NINOS.
Q: Any other neutral cycle info you can share?
A: Only to answer how do we know which episode we are going thru at the time, and that’s done by measuring the tropical Pacific waters. Yep, that’s it. A rainy month in Southern California, and you might say, “Oh, it’s an EL NINO.” But it might not be, not until we can measure to Pacific water temperatures over time to confirm the rest of the episode.
For a “new” meteorological discovery (only about twenty years ago), this is very exciting stuff for us weather geeks.
Q: How long have you been a meteorologist? Did your last name have anything to do with your job choice, or is it just perfect synchronicity?
A:I started as a hobbyist as early as 7th grade, winning a state science fair with a weather project. It is my real last name, and I suppose that might have had something to do with starting down this road, but I wouldn’t have it any other way now.
Many thanks to Big John!
Reading: Run With The Horsemen, Ferrol Sams
Listening To: Weather Radio (Seriously! Must wrap plants!)
Blooming: Camellia - This is only a bud, but with the low temperatures we're supposed to get this week, it may never make it into full bloom!
Hey, might not look like much, but the folks at Co-op tea swap liked it. They ran a contest on twitter for their avatar (the wee image that appears by each post), and I submitted the tea image above. They wrote this nice post about it: http://teaescapade.wordpress.com/2009/01/11/twitter-avatar-contest/
(they don't say how many people submitted, and I'm not going to ask. If I was the only entrant, fine by me!)
If you like tea, you might want to join this labor of love. Each month these guys pair up tea partners and twice a month, the partners send each other samples of loose tea. No promotion, just fer the love of it. I have gotten to taste teas I probably would never have purchased, but have really enjoyed (hazelnut rooibos rocks!) They're online at the post above, or on twitter @coopteaswap. Look for the cup o' tea.
I’m a twitter fan, I admit it. Maybe even a zealot. As a result I find myself answering the question “What IS twitter?” quite a bit. There’s so much going on with it, and so many ways to use it, it’s hard to explain over a coffee. In fact, this turned into a very lengthy post. So – here goes my Intro to Twitter:
Twitter is an online community, also fashionably called social media. If you have a facebook or myspace page, if you blog or comment on blogs, if you post photos to flickr or videos to Youtube, you already use social media. Twitter is usually described as microblogging, as each posting, or tweet, has a 140 character limit. I think it’s much bigger than that – it’s much more interactive than most blogs, much fresher, faster, and informative.
A great intro is on Youtube “Twitter in Plain English” by CommonCraft. Highly recommended viewing:
(Common Craft has made lots of “In plain English” videos, so if you have questions about RSS/blog readers or other media topics, search for them in youtube)
My original impression of twitter was that it was mostly bored people in line to get a coffee twittering “In line to get a coffee now” and I thought – who cares? And there are certainly a lot of tweets about meals and laundry and coffee, but generally, they’re humorous, more like odd little vignettes from people’s lives, and those kinds of tweets are often sprinkled among very informative tweets with links to articles, blog posts, videos, and a world of knowledge. This will naturally be shaped by who you choose to follow.
One of the things that finally got me off of my digital duff was an article in the NYT magazine called “Brave New World of Digital Intimacy” about how twitter and other social media creates “ambient intimacy”. And I thought – intimacy? I’ll give it a swing! (The whole article is here http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/07/magazine/07awareness-t.html?pagewanted=all )
People around the world are on twitter. I often see news on twitter before it makes it to any mainstream outlet. The first reports of the Mumbai bombing were on twitter – more on that later.
Let’s get started: You start by opening a twitter account. It’s free. Go to http://www.twitter.com/, and sign up. You’ll need a “handle” or user name. Some prefer “Bikerdude” or “mommyvixen”, but I just use my name. When giving someone your twitter handle, it is preceded by the @sign, so my handle is @mary_siceloff. You can see what my twitter profile looks like by going to www.twitter.com/mary_siceloff.
Set up your profile. Again, you can use a picture of yourself or any other “avatar” to stand in for you. I started out hiding behind an image (shy me), but then I realized how much I liked seeing the real pictures of people I was communicating with on twitter, so now I use a picture of me.
Your bio is very important. When people come to your profile page, they want to know about you in 160 characters (yep, a few more than a regular tweet). If I go to a page that has no bio, I usually don’t follow that person. It can be a list: Writer, gardener, father, friend” or something like “taking a year off to write about ….” Or “Passionate about food, horses, and detective novels.” Whatever. Don’t stress too much about it – you can change/update it at any time. But do start with something.
My recommendation: do not protect your updates. Twitter is the ultimate open community, and if you’re worried about people reading what you write, it isn’t for you.
I think that it’s good to start by reading other people’s tweets. You can do this by searching twitter for people who are talking about things that interest you. Go to http://www.twitter.search.com/ (or click the “search” button at the bottom of your twitter home page), and search for “horses” or “tea” or whatever. A list will populate, and you can read their tweets, and click on their handle to read their profiles.
Start making your own tweets. They can be about your day, your challenges, your epiphanies, whatever. When you have a few tweets up, so that people can see that you use your twitter account and a bit about who you are, start following people. You do this by going to their profile and clicking on the “follow” box under their avatar.
They will get an email saying “@yourhandle is now following you”. Most people will then click over and check out your profile. If they are interesting to you, you will probably be interesting to them. They’ll read your bio and a few tweets, and choose whether or not to follow you.
I follow back almost everyone who follows me. The exceptions are people using twitter just to sell things. When I see a profile that is only about a product, I don’t follow back. Call me crazy.
And you’re off. As tweets come in from people you follow (your twitter stream), they’ll reference and/or be in conversation with other people, and you can check those people out, too. Keep searching terms that interest you and find people talking about those things. Keep following, and keep tweeting.
The next important step is to get into conversations. It’s a community. If someone tweets something that you agree or disagree with, that intrigues you and you want to comment or ask them about it, you can @reply to them. If you hover your mouse over the right side of their tweet, you will see a star and an arrow. If you click the arrow, a tweet will start with @theirhandle. This will go to them, and will also appear in your general twitter stream. Don’t worry if they don’t respond or comment back, just keep tweeting. Eventually people will respond.
If you want to put a link in your tweet, you’ll probably need to shorten it. You can do that by going to http://www.tinyurl.com/ and generating a condensed link. These are permanent re-links –copy and paste the shortened link into your tweet.
If you’re using twitter with any regularity, I highly recommend downloading and using a free program called tweetdeck (instead of from your web-based profile). (http://www.tweetdeck.com/) You can create up to 10 columns, one of which is your main twitter stream, another can be @replies, and another direct messages. When you initiate a search in tweetdeck, it creates column for that search and will always send anything it finds in the search to that column. I have one for "food safety", one for "fda" etc.
You can also use columns for groups that you create in tweetdeck, but I don't use this function as much, since it doesn't remove those people from your main stream - it's an additional stream. @johnhaydon is a social media coach for non-profits, and good person to follow for twitter tips. He has great instructional videos on tweetdeck.
(Note – although tweetdeck is free, it runs on donations. Best $15 I’ve spent in a long time.) Tweetdeck has a built-in URL shortener, and they make it easy to @reply, DM (direct message, which you can only send to someone following you back) and RT (Retweet – it posts someone else’s tweet in your stream, crediting them. It’s like forwarding.)
Lastly, hashtags (#). Hashtags funnel every tweet with that label into one stream. For instance, #tea, #gaza, #coalash etc. Also conferences will also have #sobcon09, or whatever, so that people twittering at that conference can stream all their tweets to one place. Just search for that hashtag. This is great, because you can see everyone, all over the world, twittering on that subject. #mumbai was extraordinary. These groups surface organically. At the moment, I see people are twittering #big09 with their news year’s resolutions.
There are lots of great applications springing up around twitter. You can check your Twitemperature, http://www.twitemperature.com/, or how happy your tweets generally are http://www.tweethappy.com/. You can see how you rate on http://www.twittergrader.com/ etc. There are apps like twitterberry for your blackberry and twitterfon for your iphone. You can put pictures up using http://www.twitpic.com/. The list goes on and on. Perhaps that will be another post – enough for now, eh? Tweet me if you have questions!
"Big John" Wetherbee is a meteorolgist for WTOC in Savannah. His weather report caught my eye, because he mentioned that we are in a "neutral" weather pattern this year. I wanted to know more, and he kindly agreed to answer some questions via email:
