Enough already: Get the weather out of this trough

If you are tired of being noble and are beginning to join in the great indoor sport of griping about the weather, you have some reason.

"C'mon, whaddya expect, this is Montana in the winter" doesn't cut it when it's been more than six weeks since the temperature was above freezing. That was Jan. 16, a lovely Saturday when it was a balmy 43 degrees. According to the Glasgow office of the National Weather Service, since winter clumped into town about the first of December, we have seen exactly seven days above freezing: two in December, five in January and zero, that's none, in February.

OK, but the high crystal blue sky makes it not so bad. Sun shining on the snow and all. Not. For the last three months, the majority of days have been cloudy or partly cloudy and have had snow, at least a trace.

Not that the snow has amounted to much. (Gripe points keep mounting up here.) Looking at the inches since the season began, we're 6.7 inches above normal, but it has been dry, light stuff, hardly packing any moisture. Since Oct. 1, the NWS has measured only 1.88 inches of precipitation, down .21 inches from normal.
We haven't even started to talk about the fog. Has there ever been such a foggy winter? The thrill of waking up to a frosty wonderland covered in sparkly crystals has degenerated into just another morning of freezing fog. It got downright dangerous in January, when days of freezing fog topped off with drizzling freezing rain caused a cascade of downed power poles and electrical outages that lasted up to a week.

December had 23 days with fog, January had 22 and February had 24. March isn't looking good either. Monday night, a driver couldn't see from one roadside reflector to the next.

Great Lakes Airlines and their passengers must be gnashing their teeth about missed flights. There has been no plane into Glasgow since Monday morning, and might be none until Wednesday afternoon. There was another three-day blackout in early February.

Fog and its fabled aftermath were the subject of a note in the Glasgow office's Under the Big Sky Newsletter of Feb. 24. Tanja Fransen, the warning coordination meteorologist, wrote about the farmers' predictions associated with fog.

"90 Days after Fog: We are hearing this comment a lot lately. But, the funny thing is that rarely do I hear this 'wives' tale' told the same way. For some it’s 60 days, for others it’s 90 days. For some it’s a major storm, while for others it can be any precip at all. One of our cooperative weather observers called me 90 days after a fog once and said, 'See, it’s raining 90 days after our fog.' They got a trace. I’m not sure if that qualifies as a 'Big Storm.'

"I know our history is full of wives' tales, some truer than others. A few years ago, our former science and operations officer, Tom Salem, actually did a research paper on it. He found that this only occurred about 30 percent of the time, while our normal precipitation pattern is to get precip one in every four days (25 percent).

"From an e-mail Salem sent us this week, 'The presentation shows some of the history behind the folklore that this may have come from Ben Franklin asking whether fog in August causes more snow in the winter (in France). It is interesting that in looking at the small sample of days that I had from August it does rain about 50 percent of the time 90 days after fog in August. What I did not check was what is the percentage of days it typically rains/snows in November in Glasgow, I just used the average for all year long.'”

David Shallenberger at the Glasgow office of the NWS took the time to explain what forms all this fog and why it is hanging around. He said the weather phenomenon known as fog is a difficult weather feature to forecast.

"Generally, for fog to form, the lower layers of the atmosphere or near the ground need to be moist or saturated. Also, light winds are usually needed to generate fog. When winds are too high, a low cloud layer of stratus usually develops.

"A surface layer becomes moist when the temperature is lowered to its dew point or when moisture is transported from another location. The snow cover on the ground helps a great deal in keeping the temperature low to near the dew point temperature. Although northeast Montana is generally a dry climate, when a layer of snow cover is on the ground, any melting at all that occurs during the day can create enough moisture to develop fog."

We can blame El Niño for our extended sentence in a fog bank, Shallenberger said. Usually an El Niño means a dry, warm period for northeast Montana. A strong ridge is in place so most of the storm tracks head into Canada, giving Montana a generally mild winter.

But it’s a little different this year. There has been a southern storm track too, leaving northeast Montana in a stagnant pattern with nothing strong to push air masses along in the atmosphere. With the exception of the two blizzards in January, there has not been an active pattern. The Jan. 22 blizzard cleared out the four days of fog but provided the snow cover to produce fog.

March will be different, Shallenberger promised. The angle of the sun increases, creating more heat to melt the snow and warm the surface. Generally an active period of weather systems begins that will “flush out” the atmosphere, he said.
The forecast for Friday says a storm system will move through eastern Montana. While it won’t produce a lot of snow, they say it will clear out the fog.

Anything for a change of scenery and a return to scheduled air service.