The Year With No Summer

Yesterday we had snow flurries and a high of 5ºC, and today will be more of the same. This is Victoria Day weekend, our first long weekend of the (supposed) summer. It made me think of this post from five years ago.  (Update: Some Canadians have it even worse this weekend. Link sent by Kim Shay.)

When I was a child I read a novel that mentioned a year in the 1800s when there was no summer. I read a book a day at that time and they all blend together, so don’t expect me to remember a title. What I’ve never forgotten, however, is that there really was a year without summer.

I imagined a year with snow cover all year round, when people ice skated on frozen lakes in July. It wasn’t quite like that, but 1816 was an unusual weather year. There was a snowstorm that dumped 4 inches of snow in New England in the middle of June, and there was frost overnight for several days in a row in both July and August. In between those extraordinary occurrences, there was normal summer weather, but the frosts caused crop failure in the northeastern US and eastern Canada.

In Europe, there was nearly constant cold and wet, with crop failures there, too. In Ireland, it rained for 142 days in the summer, causing a famine. There was no grape harvest in France and no grain harvest in Germany. 

Historians blame the eruption of the Tambora volcano in Indonesia the year before,  the biggest eruption in recorded history. All those ash particles in the atmosphere of the northern hemisphere were bound to cause significant changes in the weather.

Not every result bad. There were brilliantly colourful sunrises and sunsets, which some say inspired the intense glowing depictions of the sun on the horizon in the paintings of the British impressionist painter J. M. W. Turner. You see an example in Turner’s painting of Flint Castle above, and another in one of his nautical paintings, The Fighting Téméraire tugged to her last Berth to be broken up.

According to oral tradition, we had a year without summer in the Yukon, and people starved here, too. In the 1970s, Yukon elder Rachel Dawson reported that it occurred over one hundred years before her time. Here’s how she describes it.

Two winters joined together. No snow, but there was ice all over, and the winters were joined together. 1

There are variations to the story, and it’s impossible to pin down exactly when it was. Perhaps it was 1816, when the Tambora volcano wreaked widespread havoc, or maybe it was either 1845, 1849, or 1850, when tree ring measurement shows very little growth.

But it all goes to show that in the weather realm, strange things can happen anywhere at any time. What I’m waiting for is the year with no winter. Of course, we’d chalk that up to global warming/climate change.

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1When I originally posted this, I linked to a source for the information and quote. That document is gone now, but I found this book corroborating the info, but not the quote.

No Conversion Necessary

You thought this was going to be a soteriological post, didn’t you?

Nope, it’s about my outdoor digital thermometer, which registers to -40. It didn’t register anything this morning.

The nice thing about -40 (Yep, -40 is good for something.) is that it requires no conversion from Celsius to Fahrenheit. (Thank goodness for spell-check.* My original spellings of both of those were wrong.) Forty below zero is similarly cold in any language.

A woman in a parka and snow pants just trotted by my house. I think she’s trying to get home as soon as possible. And there goes my neighbor, walking home for lunch. She has hoarfrost on the hair that’s peeking out from under her tuque.

It could be worse. At least there’s no ice fog at my place. The sky is bright and clear and beautiful.

I wanted to take a photo from the second story so you could see the mountains, but the door to the upper deck was frozen shut. So I’ve made do with a photo of the backyard from the back door. This is what cold looks like.

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*Did you know that spell-check can be spelled either spell check or spell-check? I know that because my spell-check says spellcheck is wrong.

My Place 6

Night sky, 12:30AM, June 21

The summer solstice was early this morning, at 4:28AM, to be precise. This is what the sky looked like right before I went to bed last night. It was a little less than an hour after sunset and 4 hours before sunrise. So the sky would have been a little darker at, say, 2AM, but there’s no way I was staying up to photograph that for you. And I was pointing right at the place in the sky where the sun was below the horizon, so directly behind me the sky would have been darker.

You’ll see from the chart below (a screen shot from Weather Underground) that it never really got dark, because while we still have sunrise and sunset, there’s nothing at all in the boxes for the start and finish in the twilight categories.

We all, you know, had our summer solstice moment at exactly the same time—all of us in the northern hemisphere, that is. But what is 4:28 AM for me would be 7:28 AM for those of you on EDT.  Don’t ask me what it was for people in Newfoundland; I only work in full hours. And of course, for some, that moment might fall on a whole other day, datewise. I haven’t figured that out for sure yet, either. [Update: I think I’ve figured it out using this map. I’m willing to go out on a limb and say that we all had the solstice on the same date this year, but I don’t think it always works that way.* You are allowed to correct me on that.]

[*Update 2: Yes, most years the solstice occurs on two different dates. In 2000, for instance, the solstice was at 1:48AM June 21 UTC, which means it would have been June 20 anywhere in North America.]

Update 3: Here’s a picture of the sunset—at 11:30ish—on the 22nd.