WELCOME TO THE SEVERE WEATHER TEAM 9 WEATHER BLOG

Greetings everyone and welcome to the Severe Weather Team 9 Weather Blog. If you have a passion for weather, you've come to the right place.

We'll use this forum to discuss Ohio Valley weather in greater detail and answer as many weather questions as possible. You can send in your questions to weather@wtov.com.

MARCH 17, 2010: EQUAL DAYLIGHT AND DARKNESS TODAY VERSUS THE EQUINOX. WHY?

The vernal equinox is this Saturday at 1:32 pm, making it the official start of spring. Equinox is from the Latin for ‘equal night’, and indicates the time when daylight and darkness are equal. This occurs because the sun is at a right angle to Earth’s axis, and the northern and southern hemispheres get the same exposure to the sun. This suggests that daytime and darkness are of equal duration at the equinoxes.

But for the Ohio Valley, that's a lie.

The date when day and night are closest to 12 hours each is actually today, when sunrise and sunset are 12 hours apart. On Saturday we get some bonus sunlight because the Earth’s atmosphere refracts the sunlight, bending it a small amount around the nighttime side. The causes sunrise to be little earlier than it would be otherwise, and sunset to be a little later. So at the exact time of the equinoxes the days are longer than the nights for both hemispheres.

Email your weather questions toweather@wtov.com.
I'm meteorologist Jeff Oechslein.

MARCH 16, 2010: MY SIGN OF SPRING

Every year phone calls and emails come in when people see their “first” robin of the late winter/early spring season. To many, it’s a sign that spring has arrived, or at least is near.

Not that I have anything against robins, but around here they just are not that reliable of an indicator that spring has sprung. While many, perhaps most robins do indeed head south for the winter, a hardy few stick around in the woods all year, and some of these birds come out even in the dead of winter. I saw a couple robins here at the station when I came in to work on Friday, February 5, just before we picked up those sixteen inches of snow late that Friday afternoon into Saturday.

For me, a surer sign of spring is not something I see, but something I hear. And I heard it for the first time this season this evening. You probably know the sound. Many describe it as kind of like sleigh bells. It’s the sound of the spring peeper. These tiny frogs, each one only an inch or so long and weighing in at well under an ounce, make what I consider a beautiful song that spring is here when they sing in chorus from their woods and wetlands.

So wait until the official start of spring on Saturday at 1:32 pm if you want. But I’ll believe my ears . . . spring is here!

E-mail your weather questions to weather@wtov.com.
I'm meteorologist Kevin Carter .

MARCH 4, 2010: PERFECT WEATHER FOR A GRADUAL SNOW MELT

Coming off the snowiest February on record, fears of flooding are on a lot of minds as we approach the spring thaw season. Some good news though from the weather standpoint is that nice warm ups during the day with a strong March sun and dips below freezing at night should really help for a controlled melt.

The best news I have for you is that we won't have to deal with rain through early next week. It's perhaps the best way to shrink the incredible snow pack built up over the past month. Slow and steady, no added water, and no truly excessive heat. Now, will that mean no flooding? I can’t promise that. There will be plenty of water being released into the waterways that river levels will steadily rise, but perhaps we can at least stave off an even more catastrophic kind of flooding because we won't be seeing it all melt at once with a heavy rain storm on top of it.

Email your weather questions toweather@wtov.com.
I'm meteorologist Jeff Oechslein.

MARCH 3, 2010: CHILE QUAKE MAY HAVE SHORTENED EARTH’S DAYS

The massive earthquake that hit Chile on Saturday may have some permanent effects on the earth. The days have become shorter, although the measurement is too small to be noticed.

According to calculations made by the scientists in the Jet Propulsion Laboratory at NASA, the earthquake has had a major impact on the earth’s rotation, and also the axis, thus bringing about a change in the length of the day. According to researchers, the earthquake has increased the speed of the rotation of the earth, thus decreasing the length of the day by about 1.26 millionths of a second.

Email your weather questions toweather@wtov.com.
I'm meteorologist Jeff Oechslein.

MARCH 2, 2010: A FEBRUARY UNLIKE ANY OTHER

If you lived through November, 1950, then you had experienced something like it before. But for most of us, last month was one of a kind! The 41.6 inches of snow we received was our snowiest month since we were buried under 47.5 inches in November of 1950. We smashed the old February record of 29.5 inches set fifty years ago by more than a foot!

Five daily snowfall records were set; 8.7 inches on February 5, 7.3 inches on February 6, 3.6 inches on February 9, 2.2 inches on February 10, and 7.7 inches on February 26. Only eight of the 28 days last month were flake-free, and all that snow pushed our seasonal total to 63.7 inches by the end of the month, 32.5 inches above average.

Melt all that snow down, and add a little rain, and you come up with 2.72 inches of liquid precipitation for February, one-third on an inch above average. By far most of that precipitation was snow, since we only had one day with precipitation that was not at least mixed with snow, 0.08 inches of rain on February 22.

February was a very cold month, with our average high at 32.1 degrees, 6.8 degrees below average. The average low last month was 0.8 degrees colder than normal at 20.4 degrees. Our warmest temperature of the month was only 40 degrees, reached on February 20, 21, 22, and 24. We slipped to our coldest temperature of zero degrees on February 8.

E-mail your weather questions to weather@wtov.com.
I'm meteorologist Kevin Carter .