Category Archives: Weather

Rain on the horizon

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The Atlanta TV weather forecasters are excited about the increasingly likely rain next week. In Atlanta, at least, the rain is supposed to start Monday evening and last potentially through Wednesday. At one time they showed rain contours that indicated up to three inches in the Rome area. I think that might be an optimistic estimate, but it sure looks like we’ll get some.

If we get an appreciable amount, it will be the first since we moved into our house in late July.

Given the probabilities, I decided I should spread some wheat straw around the house.

load-o-straw

I got 25 bales. In this area wheat straw goes for around $6 a bale. I went to a local hardware store and got it for about a dollar a bale less than the big-box home store.

I got about a third of it on the ground Saturday afternoon.

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Almost all of our yard looks like the red clay in this shot. I’ll spread the remaining bales Sunday.

If we get rain I hope it washes these little kittie tracks away.

catprints

These have been here since the light shower we got back in the middle of the summer. I think they’re Chloe’s. Leah asked me to sweep them off the drive, but they don’t sweep. It’s going to take water.

I hope we get some.

Rough Ridge Fire

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On Thursday morning we got up and, as usual, I looked out the window to see the sunrise. This is what I saw.

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I wondered why there was a cloud bank with such a clearly-defined edge when there was no passing front at the time. I learned later that it wasn’t clouds, it was smoke coming from the Rough Ridge fire burning in extreme northern Georgia near the Tennessee line. It has been burning since October 16. As of Thursday it had burned more than 10,300 acres. That’s about 16 square miles. The smoke has been blowing down towards the Atlanta area from the Rough Ridge fire and some others.

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The smoke was thick enough that a Code Red air quality alert was issued for the Atlanta area. That means that the particulate matter was high enough to be unhealthy for all people.

The wind direction changed on Friday. This is what the view looked like Friday afternoon.

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Downtown Rome, which is usually visible, is almost completely obscured by smoke. There was a noticeable haze up on the mountain and a slight odor of smoke. I think the thickest part of the plume was east of us; it was not bad, but we were clearly within the plume.

The Rough Ridge fire is burning in the Cohutta Wilderness in the Chattahoochee National Forest. It is thought to have started from a lightning strike. At this point it has not reached populated areas, which is good for residents, but its location in the wilderness area has caused problems for fire fighters. The terrain is rough and the area is isolated.

The unusually warm and dry weather and windy conditions have made fire danger particularly high. The relative humidity has been in the 20-percent range, which sounds to me more like what you might see in the western US.

This Web site has some photographs from the fire.

Atlanta’s air quality was upgraded on Friday to Code Orange, which is unhealthy for sensitive groups. It’s better, but still not good. As far as I can tell, our air quality index is Code Yellow, or moderate.

The weather forecast for Friday night was for more windy conditions. One of the firefighters said in an interview that the fire won’t be completely out until we get a long, soaking rain. There is no rain in the forecast for the next week, so we can expect the fire to continue to burn.

How dry I am

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The weather here on the mountain has been very pleasant for the last couple of weeks. It has been sunny, warm during the day, cool at night, and dry. Mostly dry. This part of northwest Georgia is in “exceptional drought” according to the US drought monitor. Here’s the map, followed by the scale.

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Floyd County is roughly in the middle of the region; it’s the county that looks like of like a fist giving a thumbs up. Based on the official airport record, we have had exceptionally little rain on the mountain from July through October 26. This July was the seventh driest on record at 1.45 inches, far below the average of 4.71 inches. September was the driest on record; the airport recorded 0.24 official inches in September, although I don’t believe we had that up here. October at 0.01 inches so far is third behind 1963 and 1938, which had no rain in October; not much real difference there. I’ll come back to August.

Based on the precipitation record, we are on track to have the fourth driest four-month period since 1900. The only reason it’s not the driest period on record is that the airport recorded a huge amount of rain in August (6.42 inches) which we did not have up here on the mountain.

All the houses on the mountain rely on wells for water. So far we have not had any obvious problems with ours. However, when I took the dogs out to the street for a restroom break, some neighbors from up the street stopped on their way down to visit a friend and fill a large water tank on their trailer. They said that they had had a 400-gallon water tank installed in their basement for backup. In fairness, I think some other neighbors told us that  those neighbors had been having well problems earlier, so their current problem may not be entirely due to the drought.

On Tuesday there was a 160-acre wildfire on the other side of town from us. Other fires in the vicinity have been even larger. That might not sound like a large wildfire compared to those in the western US, but they are large for this area.

We have given up on the idea of planting anything in the yard until next spring; we simply cannot risk using well water to keep plants alive and maybe not having enough water for household use.

There is essentially no rain in the near-term forecast. The next few months are expected to be warmer and drier than normal. In addition to exceptionally little rain this summer, we have also had exceptionally hot weather. I expect to see a larger-than-normal number of trees dying in the next year or two as a result of the drought stress from this summer.

A few new shots

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Last Tuesday when we went downtown for jazz night at a local bar, the moon was close to full. The only camera I had was, of course, the one in my iPhone. This is how the moonrise looked from Broad Street.

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The City Clock is at center. I have mentioned that before. The First Baptist Church is on the right. The large brick building in the center is the old, old Post Office, which also housed the federal court at the time. My father worked for many years in that Post Office before the it moved about two blocks away. He retired from what was then the “new” Post Office. The Post Office moved yet again after he retired. I still like the old, old building.

Here’s a sunrise, this time from our driveway, featuring the twisted old maple tree we saved when we cleared the lot.

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According to our Atlanta TV station, Saturday night was the coldest night since last April. It was not our coldest night, because of this:

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What looks like a vast sea is the top of the temperature inversion from overnight. It got down to around 40F beneath that fog; however, since the winds had died down and it was clear, our low up on the mountain was 51F.

A brown fall

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Last week as I was coming back home on Huffaker Road, something caught my eye on Lavender Mountain. At first I couldn’t figure out what it was. It looked like a light brown streak near the top of the ridge. Then I realized. It was trees with brown leaves.

Here’s a view from our front porch.

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There is a patch of light brown at the left of the image along one ridge line; that’s like what I saw from Huffaker Road. The brown tree at lower right is a dogwood. The dogwoods have been turning brown for weeks. One of our neighbors was worried that it was the blight that has stricken dogwoods in the Pacific Northwest and on the East Coast. I was more inclined to think it was simply stress, because here in Northwest Georgia we are in extreme drought conditions. It may be a combination, since drought stress can make the trees more susceptible to things like the dogwood blight.

Now other types of trees are showing stress. The maples seem to be doing ok. A few are actually showing some color. Most of the hickories seem to be doing reasonably well, too. Various types of oak are not doing well. They don’t normally have much color in the fall before they lose their leaves, but these trees look more like they’re dying rather than just preparing for winter.

We had a fairly wet spring, but there has been no significant rain on the mountain for at least the two months we have been in our new house, and it has been hot. Nineties have been common. Atlanta is approaching the 1980 record for the number of ninety-degree days in a year.

Neighbor John has been preparing our driveway for paving. His heavy equipment has left a layer of powdery dust that puffs up around the dogs’ feet as they walk. It coats the cars, the side of the house, and us.

It looks like the only color we’ll have this fall is brown … brown leaves and brown dust.