Moisture and motorcycles - a new reality

It's late January in eastern Idaho - the heart of winter.  Historically this meant snow, ice, and COLD.  My first experience with Idaho winters was in January 1977 when I rolled into Rexburg Idaho to attend Ricks College (since renamed BYU-Idaho).  I got off the bus and started the 6-block hike up the hill to campus.  The roads were literally sheet ice.  I remember this because when my suitcases got too heavy to carry I just leaned down and slid them along the ice all the way to campus (this was in the days before suitcases with wheels - what a great invention!).  Roads and sidewalks around here were usually snow/ice covered from after Thanksgiving through March.  There was so much snow in fact that some of the more adventurous (i.e., crazy/stupid) guys in the dorm would jump from the second floor landing into the deep snow below.  My roommates and I also used to get together at the end of the day and share the ice-related wipe-outs we saw during the day, and they happened every day on campus.

There is, however, a new climate reality.

There are of course still times when streets and sidewalks are snow/ice covered, but for the most part the streets and sidewalks are now mainly dry and bare for most of the winter.  This is even in a year where we are currently over 130% of our annual precipitation to date.  So, if the climate was as cold as it used to be we should have mountains of snow, but we don't.  Sure you can see snow around, but it's nothing extreme at all.  The reason we don't have much on the ground is that it keeps melting off.

I was surprised yesterday afternoon (1/26/2015) when I noticed someone zip by on a motorcycle.  I saw another person on a motorcycle this morning.  Motorcycles in January in Rexburg, Idaho!?  In days past you'd take a motorcycle out in January only if you had some kind of death wish.  Now, however, the roads are bare so if you bundle up it's completely doable.  I was doubly surprised yesterday when I saw that the weather forecast for today is RAIN (!!!???).  We are slated to reach temps in the low 40sF today and it may not even reach freezing overnight.  Now THAT'S CRAZY!

Welcome to the new reality.

The Rexburg Idaho Flood of July 15 2014 - What happened!?

During the late afternoon of Tuesday July 15, 2014, scattered showers accompanied by hail started to fall in Rexburg, Idaho.  It wasn't long before the showers became a full-blown thunderstorm of Midwestern or Great Plains proportions!

It is unusual for rain showers in this part of the state, even heavy ones by local standards to last more than 5-10 minutes before prevailing winds push them farther up the Snake River Plain.  This time, however, the storm which was extremely localized and extremely heavy stalled out right above the city of Rexburg for about 40 minutes.

Weather radar (see below) showed that the storm was located directly above Rexburg, and areas just a few miles north and south of the city received no measurable precipitation.  Official reports from an automated weather station at the Rexburg Municipal Airport reported a total of 1.14" of precipitation, but unofficial reports from higher elevations at the south end of town suggest that over 2" of rain probably fell during the storm.

The downpour produced flash floods through the city and immersed low-lying intersections and residential areas.  The massive amount of water that fell also produced back pressure in city storm drains and sewer lines that caused water to gush upward through drains and toilets into buildings and homes.

This was by all accounts a once-in-a-generation weather event for the city.  I moved here in 2002 and in all that time we never had a downpour like this one.  Life-long residents say that you have to go back over 30 years before you would come across a comparable rainstorm.

Click on this link to see images of the aftermath:

http://www.buzzfeed.com/davarav/the-12-things-you-saw-at-the-byui-flood-last-night-ulbz

You might be thinking, "Come on, one or two inches of rain doesn't sound like all that much," especially to people who live in areas where this kind of storm is relatively routine.  So why all the flooding?  What happened!?

Here are a few basic facts:

1. Rexburg is located in eastern Idaho, an area that typically receives only about 15" of rain annually.
2. Most of Rexburg is built on level ground at an elevation of 4850', while the SE quarter of town is built on a gradual rise topping out at 5150'.
3. Because Rexburg is built in a semiarid area, it is not engineered to accommodate large amounts of rain runoff from a storm like this one.  It is, however, designed to accommodate significant amounts of water from snow melt runoff in the spring that are released more gradually.  Ironically, the city was in the middle of installing an upgraded storm drainage system in the SE corner town designed to reduce surface runoff when the storm hit.
4. A significant amount of new residential building in Rexburg has occurred at the higher elevations, thus greatly increasing the proportion of area covered by roads, driveways, sidewalks, parking lots, etc., and reducing the amount of green space that is good at soaking up precipitation.  

OK, back to what happened...why the flooding?

This is a topographical map of Rexburg, Idaho (click on the map for a larger view):

The arrows on the map below show two of the tracks where water flooded most severely - remember, surface water run-off is mostly going to follow roads in a situation like this (click on the map for a larger view):

If you look at the topographical map below, the bottom-right corner has the highest elevation, and the hill slopes off to the NW.  OK, find the circular water tank located just south of the center of the photograph.  The four houses on the south side of the road, just east of that water tank, were among the most heavily damaged in the city.   Why?  (Click on the map for a larger view.)

I admit that I'm no hydrographer, but I watched this storm develop and watched the water flow from my house, which is just around the corner from those houses.  

This is probably what happened, at least in this localized area.

First of all, the storm was extremely intense, dropping a significant amount of water in a very short time - more than this area hardly ever sees in a single storm.  If you follow the topographic map's contour lines you will see that they run generally from the SW to the NE corners of the map.  Unless otherwise constrained, surface runoff water will flow downhill perpendicular to those lines.  

Rain that fell on the upper part of town quickly filled the storm drains so lots of the water moved as surface runoff.  Look at the housing development just north of the "5150" contour line marker.  This housing area slopes downward to the NW, and all roads in in converge at a low spot where the road seems to bulge upward toward the NW.  There is a walking path easement there that passes between that housing area and a neighboring apartment complex.  Water from the housing development was forced through the narrow opening along that path between neighboring houses and joined water that fell on the apartment complex's lot.  I walked that area again last night and saw that grass there was literally abraded down to nearly nothing by flowing water, sand, gravel, etc., as the water swept through in sheets across the parking lot.  The vulnerable houses were located directly in at the path of this flooding water.  Water flooded down into these houses' back yards, into basement window wells, broke those windows inward, and flooded the basements all the way to the ceiling before also breaking out basement windows on the sides and front of the house.

Of course this water was not done moving there...it was subsequently channeled largely along streets and roadways in the northerly and westerly directions.  The next thing all this water hit was the BYUI-Idaho campus where water gushed along sidewalks and walkways, streets, into quads, and even through some buildings.  This closed campus for the rest of that evening, but it reopened the next day.

Water continued to flow downhill to the lower part of town, flooding out virtually all of Main Street and many low-lying areas and intersections as water from the hill joined water that fell over the rest of town.

In the meantime, a second area hit with intense flooding was the "Hidden Valley" housing development.  This development is indicated by the blue arrow along the right side of the image above.  There's a reason it's called "Hidden Valley"...it's built up into the mouth of a valley.  That valley exists because water from fields above drains through there.  Of course this area was hard hit because water from the entire area above that development was channeled right down through the middle of the valley!  A friend who lives there has a home that backs onto a shallow drainage depression designed to channel moderate amounts of water away from homes there.  He said that by the end of the storm that the depression had been eroded into a gully seven feet deep! I heard secondhand reports that many families were displaced from their homes in that development.

Then while all of this was going on many of the student apartments around town also suffered significant flooding.  This stems largely from the fact that for whatever reason, it's been a tradition to build the first floor of student apartments so that their first floors are partially below grade.  This way walkways along these apartments put a person about 3-4' below grade (the level of the ground).  I saw MANY photographs posted showing flooding to the doorknob-level in these apartments.

Suffice it to say that this was a mess.

Interestingly, the overall attitude associated with this flood appeared to be a mixture of partying, fun, horror, and depression, depending on how you were affected.

As soon as it became clear just how bad things were in some areas and for some people, however, the community really pitched in to start to clean up.  The community response to this flood has been an inspiration to me.  As soon as the rain was gone and the floodwaters were passed, people were out all over town checking on one another to make sure everyone was all right and to see if there was any damage and pitching in to help.    

Sadly, people in this area do not have flood insurance.  Sure, if a pipe breaks and you get flooding or water damage that way in your home then homeowners insurance will cover it, but that kind of insurance will not cover things like this freak storm/flooding, since it falls under the category of "Acts of God" for which insurance companies are not accountable. 

There you have it...what happened during the Rexburg storm and flood of July 15, 2014. 

Politically disenfranchised in Idaho

Yesterday was the 2014 primary election.  For Madison County and Rexburg City, Idaho, this means that this was THE election that matters.  Now that the primaries are done the election in November is, for us, largely a formality where GOP candidates proceed to steamroll over the opposition, if any, in a tidal wave of "red" voting.  I'll get back to this later.

Idaho is politically inconsequential to most people in the United States.  Its population is so small and its political leaning is so overwhelmingly red that even Presidential hopefuls generally don't bother stopping by during their election years.  Republicans skip a visit to Idaho because they know they have the state all sewn up, and Democrats skip it because, well, it's largely a lost cause to them.

This brings us to yesterday's election and I'll use one race as the focal point of this posting:

Ron Nate vs. Doug Hancey (incumbent) for the State House of Representatives seat for Idaho District 34A.

Doug Hancey is a member of the GOP and a business man who knows what it takes to run a business, work with employees, etc., and who has a proven track record of working with house members on both sides of the aisle to get things done in the Idaho State Legislature.

Ron Nate is a also GOP, but with a stronger Tea Party flavor, who sells himself primarily as "the more conservative choice."  He is a professor of economics, and though he has been active in local political organizations he had never been elected to office.

During yesterday's primary election, as of midnight last night, Ron Nate earned 2710 votes to 2190 for Doug Hancey.  A story in today's Idaho Falls Post Register newspaper Doug Hancey said that he was disappointed, but that he was most likely hurt by low voter turn out.  Local reports also commented that voter turnout was low, and that they are at a loss about why this was so.

Why a low voter turnout?  This is no mystery.  A few years ago the Idaho state GOP voted to close all GOP primary elections.  Only registered GOP members are therefore allowed to vote in GOP primary races in Idaho.

I started thinking about this and I did some research.  District 34 includes Madison County and the northern rural part of Bonneville County, which does not include the cities of Idaho Falls or Ammon.  Rexburg is therefore the largest population center in this district.

According to the web site CensusViewer.com (http://censusviewer.com/city/ID/Rexburg), in 2010 Rexburg had a population of 25,484 with 20,289 over the age of 18 and therefore at least potentially eligible to vote.  Again, according to CensusViewer.com this is the breakdown of registered GOP and Dem voters in Rexburg in 2010:

• Republican 4, 944 
• Democrat 208

These numbers indicated that though this district votes overwhelmingly for GOP candidates, only about one quarter of eligible voters are registered as either Rep or Dem.

If we look at the voter turnout for the Nate v. Hancey GOP contest, we see 2,710 to 2,190 votes for a total of 4900 votes cast.  Is this a low turnout?  It appears to be when you compare this number to the total number of potentially eligible voters in the district (>20,000 of them), but it is probably an extremely high voter turnout when you consider the number of people would were ALLOWED to vote in yesterday's GOP primaries.  From the data above we know that about 1/4 of eligible voters in Rexburg are registered Republicans.  If we accept the assumption that about the same proportion of voters in the entire district are similarly registered we would probably see 6,000 to 7,500 registered GOP voters.  When we compare the number of votes cast in the Nate v. Hancey race to this number, the registered voter turnout is between 65% and 81%.  This is an incredibly high voter turnout.

What does this mean?  This means that the state GOP maneuvering to close its elections disenfranchises all but the faithful few in the state, and thus guarantees that at least in my part of the state that the few are deciding who the leaders will be for the many.

I wanted to vote, but it was illegal in Idaho for me to do so in the election that mattered to me - the GOP primary.  I am not a registered affiliate with any political party.  I'll say that again...it was illegal for me to vote.

As a political independent, formerly associated with the GOP, I am now disenfranchised and prohibited from voting in elections for my state and local political leadership.  Is this still America?  It doesn't feel like it.  At least it doesn't when less than 25% of the eligible voters are allowed to decide who sits in city, county, and state elected offices.

What is going on!? Early snow melt in Rexburg, Idaho

I live in Rexburg, Idaho.  For anyone who has lived here, gone to school here, or maybe even just visited, the word Rexburg often elicits a bodily chill.  OK, it can be a very cold place.  For example, the record cold temperature for Rexburg for the month of February is -36oF.  The average monthly high temp is 33oF and the average low is 16oF (for the month of February).

So what?

This is the sight that greeted me as I walked home from work yesterday around 5pm.  This is a full-blown snow melt.  The gutter was completely full.  OK, this in and of itself is no big deal.

Rexburg, Idaho, 5:15pm on February 12, 2014

We can have occasional warm days, even warm enough to cause a melt like this, but the thing that really blew me away was what I saw this morning...

...around 7:30am I reversed my path and headed back to work, and this is what I saw (see below).  My phone showed a temperature of 36oF and the gutter was STILL full of snow run off.  This is very, very, very strange.  To have a warm day and melt some snow during the day in Rexburg is no big deal, but to have overnight temperatures that do not drop below freezing and to see snow melt all night long in mid-Feb is strange, strange, strange.  Did I mention that this is strange?

Rexburg, Idaho, 7:30am on February 13, 2014

Was this one-day event caused by global climate change?  No, it's virtually impossible to link a specific one-day weather event like this one directly to climate change.  But, what you can say with a high degree of confidence is that the current global trend of warming makes weather events like this one more likely to happen.

Stay tuned, life is interesting.

Has it felt like a LONG, COLD January?

That's because it was!

Rexburg, Idaho, experienced quite a cold spell throughout most of January.  How cold?  Read on.

On an aside, it kind of baffles me why low temperatures experienced in the upper midwest makes the national news, while extreme cold weather here does not.  I guess it's because most of the people in the USA are familiar with Idaho, you know, that's where they grow potatoes, and it's the capital of Montana, or something like that.  That's part of living in a national backwater I suppose.  Anyway...

According to data from the National Weather Service, and put into graphical form by Weather.com, The average January high temperature for Rexburg, ID, is 29oF, and its average low temperature is 13oF (see below).

Here are the observed temperatures for Rexburg, ID, January 1-23, 2013.

A little number crunching shows that through 1/23/2013 our observed average high temperature was 18.5oF.  That's 11.5oF lower than our average high temperature for the month.  The average low temperature here was -2.7oF.  That's nearly 16oF below our monthly average.

Yep, it was cold, cold, COLD, in Rexburg, and lots of other places this January.  

Fortunately we are experiencing a change in the weather here now.  Today's weather?  Cloudy and RAIN...!?  Yep, rain!

2012 - Hot, Hot, Hot! The warmest year on record for Rexburg, Idaho

Every month or so I get a weather summary/update from our local weather guru, Lee Warnick.  He enjoys tracking the weather...I enjoy tracking climate.

Anyway, his latest weather news release to the "Rexburg Weather Group" was quite the eye-opener.  I mean it shouldn't have been much of a surprise given the un-Idahoanly mild winter we had in 2011-2012, but the effects of global climate change are being felt everywhere, even here in SE Idaho.

Here are some highlights from his weather summary of 2012:

Average annual high temperature data for Rexburg, Idaho (n=41 years of temperature data)

1. Average annual high temp = 56.25oF
2. 2012 average high temp = 59.36oF
3. Departure from average = +3.11oF
4. This is the highest annual average temperature on record for Rexburg, Idaho

Average annual low temperature data for Rexburg, Idaho (n=41 years of temperature data)

1. Average annual low temperature = 30.59oF
2. 2012 annual low temperature = 34.12oF
3. Departure from average = +3.53oF
4. This was this highest annual low temperature average for Rexburg, Idaho ever

>90oF days 

1. Average number of 90oF days = 15.6
2. 2012 number of 90oF days = 32
3. 2012 had more than twice the historical average of 90+oF days!

<0oF days

1. Average number of days with below 0oF temperature = 17.5
2. 2012 number of days below 0oF = 1...that's right only ONE!  Unbelievable!

Windy days in Rexburg, Idaho...a place already known for its wind

1. Annual average number of windy days = 65.6 
2. 2012 number of windy days = 104 
3. Yep, that's 1.6 times more windy days than the historical average.
4. The previous record number of windy days/year was 95 in 2011 (also a record at the time)

Daily temperature records

1. High daily temperature records - there were 45 new daily temperature records set in 2012
2. Low daily temperature records - there were 6 new daily low temperatures set in 2012.
3. If we were in a normal temperature year we would predict roughly equal numbers of high and low temperature records to be set, but in 2012 high temperature records to low temperature records were set at a rate of 7.5:1.

What does all of this mean?

It means that 2012 was the warmest, windiest year on record for Rexburg, Idaho.

Is this an evidence of global warming?

It is statistically difficult to tie an individual weather event, such as one warm year or one windy year, to global warming.  But, what we can say with confidence is that the current trend of global climate change makes years like these more likely to occur than in the past, and that the observed elevated temperatures and increased number of windy days are also consistent with climate models of ongoing global warming.

We can also be confident in saying, like it or not, that there will be cooler years than 2012 and warmer years than 2012 in the future, but that we are almost certainly going to see more warmer years than cooler years as long as the current trend of global warming continues.

(image courtesy of allposters.com)

The new reality? Snowless Rexburg in mid-December

Welcome to Rexburg, Idaho, 12-12-2012.  See anything strange?  Well, if you know anything about this part of the country there are all kinds of strange things in this photo.  The strangest is what is missing.  SNOW!

This is mid-December in SE Idaho, 80 miles south of Yellowstone National Park, 50 miles west of the Teton Mountain range, and at an elevation of a mile high.  Even the foothills in the background are bare. 

Last Saturday my family and I drove north to Island Park into the Targhee National Forest on our annual trek to cut a Christmas tree (you can get a USFS permit to do this for $10).  Normally the snow up there is knee deep this time of year, but this year (and last year) there was no more than an inch or two on the ground when we went up to cut our tree.

Strange, strange, strange!

A week and a half ago we even had a thunderstorm!?  This is not typical Rexburg weather.

As for the foreground...there's not a patch of snow to be seen.  A few flakes came down earlier this afternoon, but it all melted as soon as it hit the ground.

When I looked out of my office window earlier today (the photo above is what I see - not bad, huh?) I saw people on bicycles, scooters, and even the occasional motorcycle.  I also saw people wearing sweatshirts and jackets, and not even that many heavy coats, except for students from So Cal or AZ :-)

On an aside, I got an email from my folks the other day.  They live in Wichita, Kansas.  My Mom mentioned that they are seeing plants starting to push up through the ground they don't usually see until Spring.  Man, are they confused...the plants, not my folks.

If this keeps up, plants and animals are going to get more and more ecologically confused as time goes by.

Oh, I'm confident that we will get snow eventually, but so far, it's a brown, brown holiday season.

Is this the new reality?  Only time will tell.

What will the rest of the winter bring?  Stay tuned.

Summer of the Smokey Haze

When you look outside and see air quality like this you might think, yeah, that's pretty typical...for Mexico City, or Los Angeles, or sometimes even Salt Lake City, but this summer terrible air quality and low visibility have been common in the Upper Snake River Valley, Idaho.  It's been what I call "The Summer of the Smokey Haze."

These shots were taken during the early evening on 17 September 2012, from the SE corner of the BYU-Idaho campus, Rexburg, Idaho looking toward the north, northwest, and west. As you can see, the entire valley is filled with smoke. 

Normally the Upper Snake River Valley has excellent air quality anywhere from 20-50 miles of visibility.  We can usually see the mountains to the north and west of town with great clarity.  This summer though, it's been a rare day when we've been able to see them.

Fortunately we haven't had much in the way of wildfires in our area - aside from one west of Salmon, ID, but because of the topography of Idaho, wind sweeps toward our part of the state from the southwest as wind blows along the lower Snake River Plain, hits hills and mountains to the east of Pocatello and Idaho Falls, and channels the wind our way.  This year there have been large and persistent wild fires throughout much of the mountain west.  This smoke reportedly is making its way to us all the way from fires in Nevada!

Only occasionally can you actually smell the smoke in the air, but the visibility and air quality has been especially poor, all summer long.

We have had some windy days, and even a little rain, and we keep hoping that it will either blow the smoke out of here or drop it to the ground (in the case of rain).  But so far all wind does is bring more smoke.  I guess the only relief we are likely to see anytime soon is going to be connected to seasonal changes.  Maybe once temperatures start to drop and the fires south of us get under control things will get better.

Here's hoping!

The flowers are still growing like mad - odd for this time of year in Rexburg, Idaho

I walked through the Ricks Gardens at BYU-Idaho in my way to work this morning, and as I walked through I thought to myself...is it just me, or are the flowers looking especially good for this time of year?  During my lunch break I took another stroll through the gardens, and this is what I saw - flowers in full bloom and still blooming all over the place!

As I walked along I ran into one of our horticulture faculty and our greenhouse manager, so I asked them if it's just me, or are the flowers in particularly good shape for this time of year.  In response they said, "The magic ingredient is heat."  Flowers love the heat. 

Frankly, it's not that unusual any more for our first hard fall frost to hold of now until sometime in October, and we have flirted with the low 30soF only once or twice so far this fall.  As you can see, the flowers are doing great! They are growing, are in full flower, and some are even still putting out new buds.  

I asked if this was unusual, and they both confirmed that even without a hard frost, the flowers don't usually look anywhere near this good most years.

The secret ingredient?  "Heat."  

While it's difficult to link any weather event, like a warmer than average late summer, to global warming, it is fair to say that the current trend in global climate change makes it more likely for summer-like conditions to extend longer than historically normal.  

The gardens look more like mid-July to me than mid- September...

Now I'm wondering...how long the warm days will last.  I guess the only thing to do is to enjoy it while we have it.