Monday, October 25, 2010

Looking for snow measurement volunteers

Although we already have a couple, I'm always looking for a few more people who live in north Waterloo to help us out and measure the daily snowfall.

Unfortunately daily snowfall is not something that can be reliably measured with automatic equipment and as snowfall depths are so variable it is good to have a network of measurement locations.

We would provide the minimal equipment that is required but as the title of this post says it is a volunteer position.

Requirements:

- Live in the general area of the weather station, let's say Albert/Weber Street to the east, Erb St to the south, Erbsville to the West and Benjamin Road to the north.

- Have a backyard that is generally open to the sky, but is sheltered from wind and a flat area that is at least aound 4 m by 4 m.

- Able to measure the daily snowfall around 7:30 am on most days between now and early April (or whenever the snow season ends). You don't have to commit to doing it every single day (eg. you can take a vacation for a week or miss the odd weekend), but missing more than a week would be problematic.

Please email: weather@civmail.uwaterloo.ca if you are interested.

Wednesday, October 13, 2010

First frost of the season

The temperature dipped to -0.2°C in 3:30 on the morning of October 13th. This was the first time we have seen a below zero temperature since way back on May 11.

Although the date of October 13th is later than the long term average first frost date of October 1st, it is about average for the 12 years of the UW weather station. As well, the 155 frost free days was pretty much the average length of frost free days we have seen in the last decade.

Sunday, October 10, 2010

September 2010 Summary

The wettest month since 1996 that was still very hot

Overall the temperature was a degree above average, but this might not tell the whole story as the daily highs were exactly average while the daily lows were a full 2 degrees warmer than average.

However, it still may have seemed like a cool month as in the past decade September has been the month that has been most consistently above average. We have only had one September in the past 10 years that was colder than the 1971-2000 average (and that was only by 0.1 of a degree). So even though it was full degree above average this year, it was still the third coldest September of the past decade.

It turned out to be quite a wet month, in fact at 154.0 mm it was the wettest month we have seen in the area since September of 1996 (to be clear it was the wettest of any month of the year not just September).

What really got the month up there were 3 days with more than 30 mm of rain: 32.3 mm on the 3rd, 29.9 mm on the 16th, and 37.2 mm on the 38th. Ok the rain on the 16th wasn’t exactly 30 mm, but pretty close.

For the first time this year we have had more than the average amount of precipitation, 691.8 mm compared to 680.7 mm.


Summary for September 2010:
Maximum Temperature 30.6 °C
Minimum Temperature 4.0 °C
Average Daily High Temperature 20.0 °C (Long term average 20.0 °C)
Average Daily Low Temperature 10.3 °C (Long term average 8.3 °C)
Total Precipitation 154.0 mm (Long term average 87.5 mm)

(Long term averages based on 1971-2000 data for the Waterloo Wellington Airport)




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Monday, October 4, 2010

Still waiting on the first frost

The lowest temperature we saw was 2.7°C this past weekend.

Thus the wait for the first frost of the season continues.