Frozen Fog

Sunshine after a couple of days of freezing fog.  (Photo by Jo.)

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Frozen Fog

A Couple of Weeks In January

Red clay hill on a sunny afternoon.

Heading home on our afternoon walk.

Interesting clouds in a blue sky.

Ice on the little waterfall behind our house.

Ice flow from seeps on the bluffs.

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A Couple of Weeks In January

Sunday. 12/28/14

Cloudy in the morning.  Slow clearing during the afternoon.  This is what the sky looked like around 2:30 PM.

Temperature below freezing overnight, but not a lot of moisture.  Just a droplet of ice still clinging to some wild highbush blueberries.

Mushrooms growing at the base of an oak.  Looks as if something has been eating on them.

Clouds to the north during our late afternoon walk.

Mostly clear sky to the south.

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Sunday. 12/28/14

Ice Bloom

Echinacea blooms covered in ice during last week's freezing drizzle.  We are very laid back gardeners (lazy?).  Dead-heading we never do, and seldom get around to cleaning up a bed after the season is over.  Dried seeds feed the birds.  They also usually reseed and/or spread the flowering plants.

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Ice Bloom

American Sweetgum balls (Liquidambar styraciflua)

Icy Sweetgum balls.

Last Thursday was a day of freezing rain and drizzle.  We feared the accumulation might be enough to break limbs or bring down power lines, but we lucked out and only received a light coating of ice.

The porch that stretches along the south side of our house was a little icy too.
There was enough wind to blow freezing drizzle most of the way across the porch.  

It's about eight feet to the ground on the high end.

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American Sweetgum balls (Liquidambar styraciflua)

Icy Waterfall

During the extremely cold temperatures earlier this month (down into the low single digits here), the little waterfall behind our house did a lot of freezing.

Inside the overhang looking out.

The waterfall is on a little winter (i.e. drainage) creek.  While it is in our more or less in our "backyard", our house is one the same level as the top of the falls.  One must still climb down into a ravine to get a good look at the falls.

Lots of icicles hanging down from the ceiling of the overhand.

Ice "flowing" over the edge of the falls.

The little winter creek that feeds the falls.

Falls from the top side.

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Icy Waterfall

Ice Storm Revisited

Jo put together a collage showing more or less the same areas on our place at the end of January, 2009, and end of January, 2012, when our temperatures are hitting the lower sixties. After the ice storm, we were without power for a little over three weeks and without phone service for almost a month. It took us three days to chainsaw our way out, and would have taken longer had we not met up with a county crew working from the other direction.

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Ice Storm Revisited

Wordless Wednesday

Wordless Wednesday

Tree Year 2011: American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) #3

Our American Persimmon enjoyed a variety of weather over the past week.  Tuesday (2/1/11) began with light rain.  Our temperature dropped below freezing mid-morning, the rain became freezing rain and ice began accumulating on everything that was up off the ground.  The freezing rain lasted for several hours, but fortunately, there was not enough ice accumulation to cause any limbs breakage or other visible damage to our trees.  Sleet and the a light dusting of snow followed the freezing rain.

Wednesday was mostly clear and cold yielding lots of sparkling ice, but little melting.

Snow began mid-day on Friday (2/4/11) and kept falling throughout the afternoon and evening.  We were predicted to receive a couple of inches of snow, but about twice that amount actually fell.  It was a wet, sticky snow that clung to the trees, but caused no damage.  Saturday was sunny and our temperature climbed up to around 40°F/4°C.  There was much snow melting, but plenty of it is still around.

Celebrate a tree in 2011.  It's easy:  Observe, photograph, sketch, discuss and share with other tree huggers.  Please click the logo above for participation details.

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Tree Year 2011: American Persimmon (Diospyros virginiana) #3

Skywatch: We Need More Sunshine

We need more sunshine before the ice will melt.

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Skywatch: We Need More Sunshine

More Ice Photos

A few more photos from the early January deep freeze before moving on to something else. These photos were taken on January 8, 2010. This one shows a leaf encased in one of the ice flows on the bluffs below our house.

Icicles on the waterfall below our house. Unfortunately, our house is on the same level as the top of the waterfall so it cannot be seen from the house. We must climb down into the ravine to view.

Water seeping into the overhang behind the waterfall formed icicles too.

Water seeping out of the bluffs above the creek froze and formed its own icicles and ice flows.

But now all the ice is gone, except for a few of the largest ice flows along the bluff. During the first several days of thawing, I often heard icicles crashing down into the creek bed as they melted and came loose from the rocks.

Today is sunny and the temperature is predicted to climb up into the lower fifties. There are no below freezing temperatures in our immediate forecast.

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More Ice Photos

January Ice Storm: Part I

A light freezing drizzle began falling here in north central Arkansas just after midnight on Tuesday, 1/27/09.  As the morning progressed, drizzle became light rain.  We lost electrical power around eight o'clock Tuesday morning.  Northern Arkansas and surrounding areas are prone to ice storms because we often experience cold surface temperatures with warmer, moister air from the Gulf of Mexico riding just above.  (See NOAA's Winter precipitation types and their environments.)

Every three or four years we have an ice storm bad enough it takes down a few power lines – usually when trees fall on them – and we are without electricity for two or three days.  By late morning, we'd had that typical ice storm.  Unfortunately, this ice storm was far from finished.  A moderate rain began falling
around noon and fell steadily until almost midnight.  By late morning you could stand out on our front porch and hear a “pop” every few seconds.  Sometimes the the “pop” was fairly gentle as a small limb broke.  A larger limb breaking was louder.  Sometimes the “pop” sounded almost as loud as a gunshot when a tree truck suddenly snapped under the strain.  The sound of trees being broken into bits is awful – and it continued steadily for around twelve hours.  During most of the afternoon, our temperature was sitting right at 32ºF/0ºC – just a degree or two warmer and all of that destruction would never have happened.

I haven't taken a formal survey, but I'd guesstimate that around 10-15% of our trees are totally destroyed, either uprooted, snapped in two or are just a stripped trunk with no branches. Another 30-40% have severe damage (i. e. are missing their tops and/or several major limbs).  I doubt any tree larger than a sapling came through the ice storm unscathed.

Most of the severe damage from the ice storm only occurred in the upper elevations.  The valleys didn't get nearly as much ice as we did.  However, right after the ice storm, no one had electricity.   The service between towns goes across some of those higher elevations and was brought down in the ice storm.  It took about a week before the small towns in our area had power restored.   Emergency food and shelter was provided for those who were dependent upon electricity for heating and cooking.  A National Guard unit out of Oklahoma even set up portable facilities providing showers and clothes washing.  Since we heat with wood and cook with propane, we didn't need the emergency help and didn't know about the showers and washing machines until they were already gone.


The ice storm was predicted, though there was no way to predict how bad it was going to be.  I made a trip into town on Monday to stock up on supplies.  I did pretty good stocking up on food items, but totally failed elsewhere.  I bought neither extra batteries nor gasoline.  (In my defense, I will say those two items have never been needed in the past after an ice storm.)   I also didn't do well with my purchasing of coffee.  I stocked up on coffee in bean form, forgetting that the coffee grinder must have electricity.  We had a stove top percolator from our camping gear, so we could make coffee, but for a while there I thought I was going to have to take a hammer to those coffee beans to break them up into a brewable size.  Jo eventually remembered the hand-cranked grain mill we've had packed away for years.  It's not a very handy tool for grinding coffee beans, but it works better than busting them up with a ball peen.

The morning after the storm, Jo and I braved a trip up the road.  Walking up the road wasn't entirely safe, but less dangerous than walking in the woods where limbs and trees were still succumbing to the stress of the ice load, breaking and falling.  I'd estimate there were at least three dozen trees of various sizes partially or completely blocking our road out.  At first, we decided to let someone else – the county or the electric co-op – clear the road and rescue us.  We reasoned that a crew with the proper equipment could clear the road down to our house in an hour or so whereas it would take Jo and I two or three days of hard work.  Having to cut all that debris up into pieces small enough for us to move would be a slow process.  It would also be a somewhat dangerous process since most of the trees were hung up and only partially down and many were entangled with other limbs and trees – and the power line.  Some limbs and trees were still under a lot of stress.  An inattentive saw cut could release a trapped limb that would re-arrange your head.

However, after a few days we realized the damage throughout the county was so extensive that no one was likely to rescue us any time soon.  So after giving the ice a few days to melt, we began chainsawing our own way out.  We made it about three-quarters of the way out when the county crew showed up and finished the job coming from the other direction.  On Tuesday, 2/3/09, we could drive out  for the first time in a week.

End of Part I.  More to follow.

(Note:  As time and a slow dialup connection allow, I will be editing and uploading ice storm photos to a Picasa online album.   If you want to check out the Picasa album from time to time, it is here.)

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January Ice Storm: Part I

More Frost Flowers

Last week's subfreezing temperatures produced many frost flowers.  Like snowflakes they are all unique.

Briefly, frost flowers form when water trapped inside the stem of some plants freezes, expands and is extruded out cracks in the stem. For more details and links to other sources, please see my previous post.

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More Frost Flowers

Echinacea and Ice

 

                                                                                 Photo by Jo

Everything -- including the purple cone flowers that hadn't been deadheaded -- picked up a thin coating of ice and/or freezing fog over the past couple of days. Most of the wintry mix fell as sleet, so the trees and power lines did not get badly weighted down with ice. We would not have been able to navigate our road out, though.

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Echinacea and Ice

Tuesday Ice

We received just a little taste of freezing rain Tuesday morning. A new cold front moved through with rain ahead of it. Rain and below freezing temperatures overlapped for only an hour or so -- and , fortunately, the ground was still warm enough that no ice formed there. Only objects up off the ground received a thin coating of ice.

If the forecast is correct, we may not be so lucky later in the week. Another blast of Arctic air is headed our way. NOAA says freezing rain is supposed to start falling Thursday night and continue through early Saturday. I hope they're wrong. It's hard to imagine keeping electrical power with that much freezing rain. We'll see.

Tuesday Ice

Waterfall Icicles

Even though Saturday's temperature climbed into the mid-sixties, there was still a little bit of ice left on the water fall below the house.








Standing directly beneath the waterfall would have meant risking being impaled by a falling icicle -- not a good way to go.











From the inside (beneath the overhang) looking out.











Yes, I did try to get a photo of a falling water drop. No, I did not succeed. This is as close as I got.

Waterfall Icicles