It’s Mid-August Here….
I truly believe Global warming is a fact….. We have serious calendar slippage here…. We’re going into the sixth day straight with temperatures above 90 degrees…. Yesterday it reached 98 (a new record and 26 degrees above normal) in the OKC area (100 and above at other locations) and the wind was blowing out of an abnormal direction…. We haven’t had any rain to speak of and all of our usual thunderstorms and tornadoes are occurring well to our Northeast in states like Iowa where weather like this is as rare as gold-pressed latinum….. It’s mid-August instead of mid-April, although, they keep saying things are supposed to return close to normal in the near future….. I’ll believe it when I see it….. If things don’t change, I expect you can be reading about Oklahoma burning to the ground since the winds haven’t let up and any little spark turns into a major fire….. The trees are budding out with yellowed and shriveled leaves…. And people wonder why I want to move out of Oklahoma!…. I never thought I would be praying for thunderstorms since that is usually the only way we get rain around here….. A nice, slow, extended soaking rain is something I’ve haven’t seen in many years….. Anybody have any ideas or forecasts on rumors behind the weird weather?…. And if you come to Oklahoma – Bring RAIN!……
April 19th, 2006 at 12:05 pm
Gary England, the local weather personality, who had a small bit part in the movie “Twister” made a statement on his weather broadcast that I’m confused about…. He stated that from the period of 1-1 to 4-15 it was the 2nd windy-est time on record…. The problem I had was his statement that we had had 26 thousand, 4 hundred and some odd miles of wind?….. Since I just caught the visual and missed most of his commentary, I was wondering how he arrived at such a figure and how you could even compute such a thing….. He was also comparing this to the circumference of the Earth which is around the 24 thousand mile range…. Since our winds alternate between North and South, how can you compute a total distance of wind?…. I would be interested in knowing exactly where all the Oklahoma dirt that’s been blowing around finally settled, or is it in a constant state of flux?…..
April 19th, 2006 at 4:08 pm
It’s a pretty silly notion, but they probably took the hourly wind observations and multiplied by 1 hour to get how many miles the wind “traveled” in that time (assuming that was the mean wind speed). Then, they added up the similar calculation for every hour of every day from 1/1-4/15 (31+28+31+15 days). From his number, the average wind speed is 26,400 miles/([31+28+31+15 days]*(24 h/d)) = 10.5 miles/h. That’s at least in the ballpark for an average OK wind speed, I guess.
April 19th, 2006 at 6:24 pm
Thanks for the calculations, HS, and I agree it’s sort of a useless figure, but it does make for good TV…. It certainly got my attention…. It leaves the impression that the Oklahoma wind travels around the world and then some!…. Pretty impressive until you start thinking about it…..