Review by Ed Quillen
Climate – May 2005 – Colorado Central Magazine
Weather Extremes of the West
by Tye W. Parzybok
Published in 2005 by Mountain Press Publishing Co.
ISBN 0-87842-473-3
We spend a lot of time and effort so that we can avoid thinking about the weather. That is, we build houses with heating and air conditioning, with walls to stop the wind and roofs to shield us from sun and rain and snow. We do the same with our vehicles, and we also equip them with four-wheel-drive so that they can move despite the mud or snow. In some ways, we might measure human progress by the degree that it enables us to ignore the weather.
Even so, we can never quite get away from it. As I write this, the weather is quite typical for a late March day in Central Colorado – sunny for a while this morning, followed by a dash of snow, and I can’t ignore that a cold night is looming which means a trip to the woodpile unless I want to take out another mortgage when the gas bill comes.
And there’s no escape from the extremes that this book focuses on: goose-drowner thunderstorms, house-crushing snowfalls, roof-smashing hailstorms, tree-tipping winds. We have to pay attention to those.
Weather Extremes of the West covers the Lower 48 from the 100th Meridian (approximately Dodge City, Kan.) west to the Pacific Ocean. Parzybok divides the area into 13 climatic zones, such as “The Cascades” and “Northern Great Plains.”
Central Colorado lies in the “Central Rocky Mountains,” and on the east, we’re close to the “Southern Great Plains and Adjacent Foothills” and the “Rocky Mountain Front and Adjacent Foothills.” Our zone’s southern border seems rather arbitrary; it’s the boundary with New Mexico and the start of the “Colorado Plateau and Southern Rocky Mountains.”
I wanted an explanation of why Santa Fé’s climate is more like El Paso’s than Salida’s or Alamosa’s, but I didn’t see it. I also encountered a case of swapped months in his description of our climate: “Daytime temperatures warm from the 40s and 50s in April to the 60s in March.” Granted, our springs are such that March often comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion, but March still comes before April here.
BESIDES THAT, though, his general description of our annual weather cycle, from the dry air that makes for cold nights in January and February to the August monsoon rains, was accurate, and along the way, I learned a few things.
For instance, there’s an excellent explanation of why Colorado snow is generally so good for skiing, but often not so good at providing enough water for the state. “Colorado’s high elevation and intercontinental location give it the optimum mix of dry, cold air, temperature, and humidity that produces low-density, dry, fluffy snow.”
How dry? “The average meteorological conversion of snow to liquid water is 10 inches of snow to 1 inch of water; however, 10 inches of Colorado snow usually contains 1/3 inch of water. In extreme cases, it takes 40 inches of Colorado snow to melt to even 1 inch of water.”
Before I read this, a snowflake was a snowflake, as far as I was concerned; here I learned that there are six major types, among them “star crystals,” “dendrites,” “columns,” and “needles.” It will tempt me to make a closer examination, rather than just swearing at the stuff, the next time I need to shovel the walk.
As for extremes, the world record snowstorm happened in our climate zone on April 14-15, 1921, at Silver Lake, up in the mountains 17 miles west of Boulder. The storm lasted 32½ hours, and when it was done, there were 87 inches of snow on the ground – containing only 5.6 inches of water.
For weather-record purposes, snowfall is counted in 24-hour intervals. I’d always wondered about that, and now I know that the records don’t allow you to go out every hour, measure the change in depth, and sum the changes for a figure.
In the Silver Lake case, “Not until 7 p.m. the next day did the weather observer attempt to measure the remarkable snowfall. He measured 87 inches of snow that had arrived since the storm began at about 2:30 p.m. the day before…. Since the Silver Lake observer only measured the snow once in a 27.5-hour period, climatologists had to determine a 24-hour amount for the record books.” So they “prorated the 87-inch amount to 76 inches and arrived at the official 24-hour snowfall total,” which to this day is the world record.
That dump was caused by an “upslope” snowstorm – something you sometimes hear about on the weather forecasts, but which was never clear to me until I read this book. Our big storms here come from upslope conditions.
It means that the wind is blowing west from the Plains “upslope” into the mountains. It means a lot of snow if there’s cold air coming down from Canada meeting moist air coming up from the Gulf of Mexico. Salida’s big dump of May, 2001 and the Wet Mountain Valley’s big March dump in 2003 were upslope storms.
Parzybok explains why some valleys, like Gunnison’s, are rightly known for bone-chilling cold, and how summer thunderstorm cells can stall and produce devastating floods. We have such around here, although they have happened only around the headwaters of Badger Creek, at the south edge of South Park. That area is almost uninhabited, so the swollen, raging creek doesn’t cause much damage.
And it’s here that you can learn about the Alberta Clipper, Colorado Low, Blue Norther, Marfa Dryline, Denver Cyclone and other weather terms that often pop up without much explanation. The book is copiously illustrated and handsomely produced, and even if it focuses on the extremes, it provides an understanding of the usual weather – not just here, but all over the West.
As the saying goes, “Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” In the case of cloud-seeding, that may not be true, but Weather Extremes of the West will certainly enable you to talk about the weather in a more interesting and knowledgeable way.
