Weather Reporting: January 4

On the weather front around the world:

• In Northern Ireland, Mummymac’s weather report said snow, but she didn’t quite believe it. Her children are very glad that she was wrong.
• In Illinois, Kim reported that it was too cold for Alice the Camel ….. and just a little dusty, too boot. She also links to a handy-dandy Celsius to Fahrenheit converter.
• It was so cold in Birmingham, Alabama that Ann’s pipes froze.
• Jen reports on cold in Pennsylvania, frozen iquanas in Florida, and childhood weather memories.
• Violet’s own weather is cloudy and mild, but she has a collection of webcams around the world (a web camboree, she calls it) so you can actually see the weather just about anywhere you please.
  
• Pam’s south central Pennsylvania forecast might allow her to take the motorcycle for a spin next Tuesday. (I’m jealous!)
• Kevin says it’s supposed to rain in southern Minnesota. What will that do to the twelve inches of snow? (I’m not jealous!)
• Annette lives in Ontario. She tells us what her temps mean in practical terms.
• Candyinsierras comments on a type of ice fog called pogonip:

  Sometimes we have a white fog of ice crystals that forms on surfaces a bit like hoarfrost. It is called Pogonip, which comes from a Shoshone or Paiute word for ice cloud, or white death. It is very beautiful. We don’t see it very often, but when we do, it looks like a fairy land of icy fog. It was called white death because breathing in the ice crystals could be eventually harmful.

• And I posted on hoarfrost.
• Update, Saturday, January 5: Darlene reports that it is “raining wildly in southern California!” Her beagle is working furiously in the garage, building an ark to save himself and anyone else in the family who will heed his warnings. At least I think that’s what she said.

Wow! That’s quite the collection, isn’t it?

You can join in this month’s weather fun, too, you know. You’ll find the details for participating here, and if you send me your link before Saturday night, I’ll add it to this post. If you send it after that, expect to see it in next Tuesday’s weather report.

If you sent me a link and I missed it, please let me know, okay? 

Extreme Hoarfrost

 

This is about the hoariest frost I’ve ever seen.* Somewhere beneath the intricate befrosting is a scrubby pine tree.

 

Hoarfrost is the build up of ornate ice crystals on twigs, tree branches, grass and other vegetation. It’s like the cold weather twin to summertime dew. When the temperature of the air cools to below the dewpoint, you’ll get dew if it’s warm or hoarfrost if it’s cold. Or, more precisely, when the dewpoint is above freezing, the condensation formed when the air temperature is less than the dewpoint will be dew; but when the dewpoint is below freezing, look for the feathers, needles, or spines of hoarfrost.

 

The word hoarfrost is made from compounding hoar, which means “grey or white haired”, and frost, which means—well—“frost.” And it does look a like hairy white frost, especially when it forms feathery tips.

 

Hoarfrost is an old word, too. My very large and very heavy Oxford English Dictionary has a 1290 quote from an English legend that says, “De hore-forst cometh wane it is so cold it froeseth a-nygt…” You’ll find it used in the Cloverdale Bible (1535), in Psalm 147:16:

He geuth snowe like woll, & scatereth y horefrost like ashes.

The King James version used hoarfrost in that verse as well, and the recent English Standard Version says this:

He gives snow like wool;
he scatters hoarfrost like ashes.

And there you have it, the last word on hoarfrost: It is God who scatters it and turns scraggly scrubs into a bejewelled beauties.

*Photo by oldest son, taken last year while caribou hunting up the Dempster Highway. It’s the Ogilvie range you see in the background. That’s typical winter light, since the sun always stays low on the horizon.

Is there any use of the moral law to man since the fall?

Although no man, since the fall, can attain to righteousness and life by the moral law;[1] yet there is great use thereof, as well common to all men, as peculiar either to the unregenerate, or the regenerate.[2]

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