Helen Fields » weather

weather and bugs

Helen — Sat, 11 Jul 2009 14:58:24 +0000

We’ve been having the most fascinating weather in the D.C. area this summer. In the spring and early June it rained all the time. The rain stopped just in time for the Folklife Festival, a two-week outdoor Smithsonian event that is always miserably hot and humid. Then something strange happened: It didn’t get hot and humid. It’s just been lovely – in the 70s and 80s with low humidity for weeks now. It gets down into the 60s at night. The fourth of July is supposed to be oppressively muggy, and it was a perfectly pleasant day.

Well, it turns out all that rain earlier in the summer was good for someone: fireflies. There’s a nice article by David Fahrenthold in today’s Washington Post about the local firefly glut. With lots of science! And amusing quotes like this from scientists:

“Some males are better than other males,” Copeland said. “And they advertise something in their flashes that says ‘My name is Joe, and I’ve got . . .’ ” Here, Copeland described part of the male body in a way rarely seen in scientific journals.

I have noticed more fireflies than usual this year – in fact, I even saw some one night in the parking lot of my apartment building, a non-firefly-friendly patch of asphalt wedged between the train lines and some kind of construction company. So, yay for rain!

Art copyright: 2009, FCIT

seasons

Helen — Tue, 02 Jun 2009 20:55:24 +0000

Several people have asked if it was strange coming back from the Bering Sea, where I considered 35 degrees Fahrenheit to be seriously balmy, to D.C., where it’s 88 degrees right now. The answer is, actually, no. The majority of the time I was up there, I was in a heated ship – it’s not like I was camping for 40 days – and there hasn’t been much of a temperature shock.

What’s really weird is the light. It feels like I came back to winter. I can’t believe it’s already dark by 9 p.m. Where are my midnight sunsets, I ask you?

Also, there are no baby seals here. Lame.

shadows on the ice

Cheryl — Thu, 07 May 2009 19:41:31 +0000

Here’s another picture from that same day when I sat reading outside the bridge. It was really sunny!

warm in the bering sea

Cheryl — Thu, 07 May 2009 18:51:05 +0000

The other day we stopped next to a big piece of ice for a few hours. It was a sunny day, 35 degrees and not particularly windy. The sun was on the side of the ship away from the wind, so a lot of the decks outside were really warm. I didn’t need to go on the ice that day because we were writing about some science on the ship, so I parked myself with a magazine on a high-up deck, just outside one of the doors to the bridge.

The jacket is under me because the deck was too hot to sit on comfortably, and I had to take off my sweater, too – that’s how warm it was. It was great being outside. I could smell the steak grilling for dinner. When gulls flew by, I heard them instead of just seeing them through the window. I heard the engines fire up when it was time to move on from the ice station.

They only needed to move the ship a quarter mile or so, to an open spot where they could put in the CTD, an instrument for measuring and collecting water. Normally I would’ve had to go inside when we started moving because of the wind, but the ice was so thick around there that the ship only made it about half a ship-length before it ground to a halt. The guy who was driving had to back and ram for about half an hour to get the ship a few ship lengths away. Meanwhile, I was reading about solitary confinement in the New Yorker. (Yikes.)

Finally I started worrying that the sunscreen in my lotion wasn’t going to protect me anymore and I went inside. Well, also, some fire alarm was kept going off, and I figured the people on the bridge would let me know if something was actually wrong.

I had the steak for dinner that night – it was really good.

uhhhhh…minus 13?

Helen — Fri, 27 Mar 2009 04:51:47 +0000

Want to follow along with the ship before I get to it? There’s a teacher on the ship now. Here’s her journal. I talked to one technician who’s on both the current cruise and my cruise, but I think most of the scientists on my cruise will be new.

Thursday I had coffee with Simone Welch, the teacher who will be on the ship with me. Simone, unlike me, had been reading the other teacher’s journal and thus was able to pass on the information that it was minus 13 on the ship the other day. Dudes. That is cold. I mean, I’ve survived plenty of 13 below – I did go to college in Minnesota – but I was thinking, like, maybe teens, maybe single digits. I’m not sure I’m mentally prepared for this.