Talking about the Weather

I've lived a few places in my life. Everywhere I moved, I learned new weather terms. Coming from southern California where the only weather terms we knew were "sun" and "rain" and the latter only in rare occurrences, I was a bit surprised with all the new stuff I found.

In San Antonio I experienced "hurricane". Yes, San Antonio. Yes, it was a long way inland, but we got hit just the same. Loads of fun. Sign me up for another. Or not.

In South Dakota it was "wind chill factor". It never occurred to me before, but it makes sense. The wind blows -- you feel colder. So I got to experience a -40°F day (yes, that's a negative number) with a -25° wind chill factor, giving us a balmy -65° day. Nice. And then there was the "ground blizzard", the effect that occurs when there is no actual snow falling, but the wind kicks up the snow on the ground so much that you can't see the ground. Very odd. In South Dakota I learned that the way to tell a native South Dakotan ("SoDak") was if the wind stopped blowing, they fell down.

In Syracuse, New York, I learned about "lake effect snow". We didn't actually have to have any clouds to provide snow there. The wind would whip across large bodies of water like, oh, I don't know, Lake Ontario or, closer to town, Oneida Lake and it would end up dumping a pile of snow downwind. So you could be driving along on a cold but sunny day and suddenly find yourself in a snow storm that isn't happening anywhere else. (Ask the people in Buffalo. They get this all the time.) And, of course, there was "freezing rain", a non sequitur where rain falls and freezes on surfaces as it hits, creating a wonderful coat of ice everywhere. Not pleasant at all. Really. (Try chipping away at an inch-thick coat of ice on your car ... in order to start it up and warm it up inside enough to be able to get the ice off the windshield to drive ... in order to take your life in your hands on the roads which are, at this point, defined as "black ice".)

In Charleston, South Carolina, I picked up "heat index". It was 105°F and 100% humidity. Welcome to "unbearably hot". I was looking around for scuba gear in my room there. The air was practically unbreathable and I understood then that humidity adds to the feeling of heat -- heat index.

I suppose the most unusual weather terms I've picked up, however, have been in Arizona. We've had haboobs
and we've seen virga.

That haboob was a dust storm some 75 miles across and 5 miles high. Makes for interesting driving (not recommended). And virga is very popular here in the desert. There's enough water to fall from the clouds but too much heat to hit the ground, so we end up with what one person described to me as "cloud jellyfish", these clouds trailing tentacles of rain showers that no one ever actually feels.

In Phoenix this last week we experienced a new one -- graupel. No, seriously. Look it up. It's not quite snow and not quite hail. It is soft hail or snow pellets. Very bizarre.

All this, of course, is mildly amusing, I suppose. Where you're from there's likely other phenomenon that you experience. It tells me, however, that we have a very creative God. I mean, seriously, snow in the desert? Who else would think of such a thing? Very cool. No, I mean, literally, very cool.