The Final Sunset of 2008
Courtesy Randy Heisch, Lake Georgetown
THE BURNING CLOCK TOWER
Photos by Sam Cole
Find your allergy medicine! Austin Allergy Associates measured the highest Mountain Cedar pollen reading of the season today–780 grains per cubic meter. That is considered a high concentration. The mold count was in the medium category at 459 particles per cubic meter of air.
Cedar season started slowly this December, but counts this high can cause allergic reactions for many who are susceptible to cedar pollen. Unfortunately, the situation will only get worse in the weeks ahead, when cedar pollen measurements in the thousands of grains become typical. The season for cedar tree pollination winds down in late January.
A Chilly New Year’s Eve
Happy New Year from all of us here in the First Warning Weather department. Have fun tonight, but be safe.
You’ll want to take a jacket along for sure. While it’s certainly a chilly not, it’s not exceptionally cold. In fact overnight lows will only be a few degrees colder than average, falling just below 40 degrees in Austin, and into the low to middle 30s in the Hill Country.
Winds have diminshed significantly tonight, so there is little if any wind chill factor to deal with.
A reminder for you that if you plan to use fireworks to ring in the New Year almost all of Central Texas is currently under an outdoor burning ban, which doesn’t prohibit fireworks, but is a reminder that you should be very cautious as wildfires can ignite very quickly and spread out of control. There are some types of fireworks that are banned due to the dry conditions, and those restrictions vary in different cities and counties. For city of Austin fireworks restrictions click here: http://www.ci.austin.tx.us/fire/fcfaq.htm#fireworks
Here’s that burn ban map:
2008 Year in Review
It seems everyone does a top 10 list at the end of the year for just about everything. So, how about a Top 10 Central Texas Weather Events list for 2008? Fortunately for me, my friend Bob Rose at the LCRA did all the dirty work for us, and put together the following:
First, some odds and ends….
· In Austin, the hottest temperature reported this year at Camp Mabry was 105 degrees on 7/15 and 8/3. For Austin-Bergstrom, the highest temperature was 103 degrees on 8/3, 8/4 and 8/10.
· The lowest temperature for the year was 25 degrees at Camp Mabry on 1/20 and 15 degrees at Austin-Bergstrom also on 1/20.
· Rainfall for the year at Camp Mabry will end up at 16.07 inches, 17.58 inches below normal. 47 percent of normal rain. The 4th driest year on record dating back to 1856. The driest year since 1956.
· Rainfall for the year at Austin-Bergstom will end up at 15.98 inches, 18.75 inches below normal. 46 percent of normal rain. The 5th driest year on record dating back to 1943. The driest year since 1956.
10 important weather events in Central Texas in 2008, in no particular order:
*May 14-15th A severe thunderstorm tracked across central Austin producing unusually large and damaging hail of 2 to 4 inches. Wind gusts of 70 to 80 mph were reported over this same area. Widespread damage to homes and businesses.
*May 10th A severe thunderstorm moved over Austin producing 2.25 inch hail at Camp Mabry and 1/8th inch at Bergstrom. Some damage was produced by this storm.
*May 13th A severe thunderstorm moved over Burnet County producing an EF0 tornado. Surprisingly, only minor damage.
*May 20th The temperature reached 101 degrees. This was the 4th earliest 100 degree reading on record. The temperature also reached 100 degrees on May 23rd.
*The month of June was the hottest June ever recorded. The monthly average temperature of 87.4 degrees was 1 degree warmer than the previous record June of 1998. There were 20 days with the temperature at or above 100 degrees. This broke the record for the most 100 degree days ever recorded in June (previous record was 17 set in 1925).
*June through August tied with 1998 for the hottest summer ever. Average temperature was 86.7 degrees. For the year, there were 50 100-degree days placing 2008 in third place for the most 100 degrees days in one year. 1925 and 1923 are in first and second place, with 69 and 66 days respectively.
*September 9th, a weak tornado developed over Lake Buchanan. The tornado developed in a fairly stable atmosphere and was widely photographed.
*Unusually cold air arrived on October 28th, dropping the temperature below freezing across most of the Hill Country and a few spots across Central Texas. The low at AUS reached 33 degrees while ATT reached 40. This is several weeks ahead of the normal first freeze in autumn. It should be noted that the barometric pressure reached 30.66 inches at Camp Mabry on October 27th. This broke the previous October record for highest barometric pressure of 30.65 inches set in 1957.
*December 9th The temperature reached a record tying high of 81 degrees at 122 pm. An arctic cold front came through the area that afternoon, plunging the temperature in the 30s by evening. The low for the day was 34 degrees, producing a 47-degree span of temperature for the day. A dusting of snow and light sleet fell across the city in the late evening. Officially , only a trace of snow was observed but some areas did receive close to a half inch. Big, fat snowflakes were observed for more than an hour across much of the city.
* 2008 will likely close as the 4th driest year on record at Camp Mabry, with just over 16 inches of rain. An moderate to extreme drought gripped the area for most of 2008. Annual rainfall has been less than half the normal annual total. Many springs have run dry. Aquifers and lakes are low. Despite 3 tropical systems moving inland along the Texas coast this summer, none of these brought any rain to Central Texas.
* 2008 will likely be the driest year in Austin since 1956, when 15.41 inches was recorded.
*16 100 degree days were recorded in July at Camp Mabry. This places July 2008 in 5th place for the most 100-degree days in July.
Here’s a great article I found yesterday about why today will be 24 hours and one second long! Enjoy…. Jim2009 to Arrive Not a Second Too Soon
By Joe Rao
SPACE.com Skywatching Columnist
posted: 26 December 2008
8:00 am ET |
Wait a second. The start of next year will be delayed by circumstances beyond everyone’s control. Time will stand still for one second on New Year’s Eve, as we ring in the New Year on that Wednesday night. As a result, you’ll have an extra second to celebrate because a “Leap Second” will be added to 2008 to let a lagging Earth catch up to super-accurate clocks.By international agreement, the world’s timekeepers, in order to keep their official atomic clocks in step with the world’s irregular but gradually slowing rotation, have decreed that a Leap Second be inserted between 2008 and 2009. The extra second, ordered by the world’s nominal timekeeper, the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, will be marked officially at the stroke of midnight on Wednesday in Greenwich, England, the home of what is popularly known as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) – Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) to the more technically inclined – the standard time for the planet.So at precisely 23:59:60 at Greenwich, England, on New Year’s Eve, there will be a one-second void before the onset of midnight and the start of the New Year. Wednesday will see the 24th Leap Second that has been needed since the practice was initiated in 1972, and will be the first in three years.Keeping the Earth on time
Around the world, to satisfy the requirements of navigators, communication organizations and scientific groups, about 200 atomic clocks in over 50 national laboratories worldwide will be adjusted at local times corresponding to midnight to local times at Greenwich. On New Year’s Eve, the master clock at the United States Naval Observatory will be adjusted at 6:59:60 p.m. EST, or 23:59:60 GMT.
The extra second is needed to keep the world’s clocks in time with the rotation of the planet. Time measured by the rotation of the Earth is not uniform when compared to time kept by atomic clocks. Today’s atomic clocks have an inaccuracy of less than one second in 200 million years.
But for various reasons – the sloshing molten core, the rolling of the oceans, the melting of polar ice and the effects of solar and lunar gravity – our planet rotates on its axis at irregular rates, and on average has been falling behind atomic time at a rate of about two milliseconds per day. It now trails the official clock by about six-tenths of a second.
As a result of this difference, atomic clocks can get out of sync with the Earth and periodically have to be adjusted. Since it’s the atomic clocks that are used to set all other clocks, a Leap Second has to be added from time to time to make up the difference.
Adding the extra second between 23:59:59 on Dec. 31 and midnight on Jan. 1 will put Mother Earth about four-tenths of a second ahead of the clock, giving her a bit of a head start as 2009 begins.
Who said chivalry is dead?
How to see and hear the extra second
Today many retailers market radio clocks as “atomic clocks”; though the radio signals they receive usually come from true atomic clocks, they are not atomic clocks themselves. Typical radio “atomic clocks” require placement in a location with a relatively unobstructed atmospheric path to the transmitter, perform synchronization once a day during the night-time, and need reasonably good atmospheric conditions to receive the time signals.
If you own such a device, you might want to watch what your clock displays just before 0 hours GMT, Jan. 1, which corresponds to 7 p.m. Eastern standard time on Dec. 31. The minute beginning at 6:59 p.m. EST will contain 61 seconds. When a Leap Second was added in 2005, I watched my own clock closely during that minute as the seconds ticked off. When the final second of that minute was reached, the number “59″ flashed not once, but twice!
If you don’t have a radio clock, you can bring up a time display on your computer by going to: http://nist.time.gov/.
You can also listen for the Leap Second by tuning in to a shortwave time signal station. In North America, the “extra tick” can be heard by listening either to station WWV out of Fort Collins, CO (see: http://tf.nist.gov/stations/wwv.html) at 2.5, 5, 10, 15 and 20 megahertz or CHU in Ottawa, Canada (see: http://tinyurl.com/y2wa2y) at 3330, 7335, and 14670 kilohertz. A listing of shortwave time signal stations for other parts of the world can be found here.
Should you encounter poor reception, try preparing a seconds pendulum by hanging a small weight on a string about 39.1 inches (99.3 centimeters) in length. Adjust the string length beforehand until the swings exactly match the time signal ticks. If the beeps denoting the start of each minute occur at the left extreme of a swing before the final (GMT) minute of 2008, they will be heard at the right extremes thereafter. (Although the swing amplitude will be steadily dying down, this does not affect a free pendulum’s oscillation period.)
Ball Drop too early?
By the time the transition from 2008 to 2009 arrives in North America the Leap Second will have already been inserted into the world’s timescale.
But there was a bit of confusion about all this back in 1972 when the first Leap Second to be inserted on a New Year’s Eve took place. An astronomer at New York’s Hayden Planetarium took a phone call that day from the engineer who was assigned to drop the famous illuminated ball in Times Square (in those days, the ball was slowly lowered using an old fashioned rope and pulley). “This can affect my job,” he reportedly said. “So I want to be sure I don’t drop that thing one second too soon!”
Regardless of how you use your extra second, just keep this one indisputable fact in mind: Whenever you note the time on the clock, realize that it is now – right now – later than it has ever been.
It wasn’t just cold rain, but freezing rain in parts of Williamson County and the Hill Country this morning. The photo above was taken in Florence by Kevin Loeffler at around 9 o’clock this morning.
Have a professional inspect and service your central heating unit each year.
