Volume 1, number 1, January 1999 Ester's Weather (in Ester, of Course) Hah! Who says Ester doesn’t have a recognizable community? We have a bar, don’t we? What? You want more? Well, how about a post office, newspaper, and a weather station? Yeah, we got the Ester National Rag an’ a weather station, no church yet, tho’. (I’ve been thinkin’ about startin’ one.) And you ask how is it that Ester has a weather station and how does that establish our repute? I am a volunteer cooperative weather observer for the National Weather Forecast Office. (If you want to holler at me for lousy forecasting you have to give me fifty bucks first.) Ester has acquired some kind of dubious status by virtue of having what is called a Cotton-Regio shelter at my observing station. This shelter houses two registering thermo-meters, one for the 24-hour high and one for the 24-hour low. The presence of this shelter means that the data from the station go into the national weather data base and therefore rains status upon our exalted Esteroid heads. What I do is take daily observa-tions of high and low temperatures, rainfall, snowfall, the amount of moisture from snowfall and the snow depth. The equipment that I use to do this is an eight-inch rain gauge, the two registering thermo-meters, a snow board and a snow stake measuring in half inch increments. The rain gauge obviously is used to collect rain, measured in hundredths of inches. I also use it in the winter to collect snow to melt for measuring moisture content in the daily snowfall. The snow board is too small to use at Moose Mountain so I just use it to measure the daily snowfall amounts, measured in tenths of inches. I use the snow stake to measure the amount of snow on the ground. I‘d tell you how the registering thermometers work but that’s too complex for my gramatiwockle skills right now so I’ll save that for the next column. At any rate, I send all this hooferah in to the National Weather Service Forecast Office once a month. I also keep a copy on file. So I suppose you want some weather stuff, eh? Oh, all right. By Dec. 16 we had 10 inches of snow on the ground and as of this computing (I use a pen to write) snow level is at 8.5 inches. We registered a low -41 degrees on Dec. 17, the lowest of the season so far. For two days on Dec. 22 & 23 we received .03 inches of freezing drizzle. On the last day of the year a cow moose assisted with the morning observation (only in Alaska!). Our totals for December are .59 inches of moisture and 9.2 inches of snowfall: not much. If I thought my editor would let me get away with it I would use the rest of this column to exercise my personal blather. But I had not been at this computer two hours when she threatened me with red ink. So remember! If you don’t like the forecast, change radio stations. | ||
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