Weather Lore

[heavyhitterokra]

Weather Lore

Since this year has started off on kind of a crazy note weather-wise, with February bringing record low temperatures and freak ice storms as far south as Louisiana, and April bringing us that blinding snowstorm that froze the peaches, apples, pears, and pawpaws off of our favorite fruit trees, who knows what's in store for us next?  

Just a few nights ago, Norman, Oklahoma and other areas were struck by a freak hailstorm, bringing hail as large as 4" inches in diameter.  All these things can wreak havoc with our gardens, our orchards, our livestock, and our homesteads, and is no doubt a topic that deserves a place on our forum.  

With that being said, I thought this would be a good time to start a new thread on the subject of weather.  Anyone having any input on the matter is more than welcome to add to it below.

[heavyhitterokra]

You're right Bon. (At least in the Tahlequah Region of the State). In 2011, we had 22" inches of rain during an eleven-day period during the months of April and May. Then, following that, we had the beginning of a drought that lasted for the rest of that year and on into the next. The drought is what precipitated the great grasshopper plague of 2012-2013.

We had 65 consecutive days over 100 degrees in 2011, with two weeks of that being over 110 degrees. On August 2nd, that year, it got up to 115 degrees here near Tahlequah. The same day, we had 20 mph winds from the South, that drove hoards of grasshoppers ahead of a wildfire in the Moodys area. I remember standing out in the garden that day, seeing heavy clouds of billowing smoke from the wildfire and hearing grasshoppers falling from the sky like rain.

Because August is the month that grasshoppers lay their eggs, we had an unusually large hatch in April-May of 2012.

I've read where rain is a major controlling factor in determining whether grasshoppers survive a hatch. Heavy rains will produce 'dewdrops' that trickle down the stalks of vegetation, drowning the young as they feed on the stems and leaves. A lack of rain will allow these young to flourish.

The high number of grasshopper eggs in the Fall of 2011, coupled with the continued drought of 2012-2013, caused a perfect storm that resulted in record numbers of grasshoppers those two summers. Finally, in the Spring of 2014, we had sufficiently heavy rain during the hatch, to kill off a good portion of the young hoppers.

In 2015, we had 82.5" inches of rain here and what was referred to as a '100-year flood.'

In more ways than one, the weather has everything to do with whether we'll have a good or bad year in the garden.

In Oklahoma, we are fortunate to have several weather resources, such as Mesonet.  Mesonet is a system of weather stations set up across the State for educational purposes, to record and keep weather data for future generations to study the patterns.  There are 120 Mesonet weather stations across Oklahoma.  There is at least one station set up in every one of the 77 counties.  You can go to their main webpage and find a weather station near you and refer to that through the years to compare current weather patterns and cycles.  
weather.ok.gov/

You can go to the main Mesonet website and choose, PAST DATA on the top right side and research old files.
 weather.ok.gov/index.php/past_data/category/past_data_links


You can go here for Mesonet monthly summaries.  There is a scroll bar in the middle of the page to choose a location nearest where you live.  Pick a time frame, then push enter.  Some of the records date back to 1994.
www.mesonet.org/index.php/weather/station_monthly_summaries

We also have the NOAA interactive satellite system.
weather.msfc.nasa.gov/GOES/

There are many others, but those are the main ones that I rely on.

[chrysanthemum]

This is a great thread, HeavyHitterOkra. Thanks for starting it.

I sure hope we aren’t headed for another drought like 2011. I didn’t live in Texas at that time, but I’ve heard stories.

We had another near miss with hail last night. A storm formed west of San Antonio and headed close enough to us that we got just the edge of it. Hail did fall, but it was sporadic and only up to about an inch. There was really very little, and it didn’t do damage at our place. Even the big zucchini leaves weren’t torn up. Looking back at radar pictures, it appears that the major storm split, and some went north of us, and most went south right through San Antonio again. There were reports of baseball-sized hail in both places. I was in the city of Boerne (pronounced “Bernie”) this evening and could see evidence that it hit there. Lots of debris and cars with smashed windshields.

I have in the past strung up netting or shade cloth to act as hail protection when I know that storms are in the forecast. This one popped up very quickly, and it was already thundering when I became aware that it was on the way. At that point I stay inside.

I still have memories of a hail storm that hit my childhood home in Virginia when I was eight. It destroyed my mother’s garden just at the peak of harvest for many plants. The roofs on the house, shed, barn, and chicken coop all had to be replaced, as did a number of windows. I also remember my mother taking us swimming in the pond when the storm was past. The air was cool, and the water was warm. It was delightful. We also rescued seven kittens that a stray cat gave birth to during that storm, and they were buried under a couple of inches of ice in a thicket near the garden. My mother heard them mewling when she was surveying the damage in her garden.

Hail is most common in April and May here, I think, but we even had it hit once in January. Thankfully I haven’t seen a very destructive storm in my four years here, but I know there’s a very real risk of one given the weather patterns, and we’ve definitely had some close calls.

[heavyhitterokra]

It has been raining here the last few days, so I've been reading through old threads to pass the time. I came across this one on page 4 of the Heavy Hitter replies. It was about our weather back in 2011-2015. I thought I'd post a portion of it here. (I had forgotten about the ice storm on May 1st, 2011). That was one CRAZY  year!

Glen,

That particular plant changed my mindset from being a gardener who reaps everything he sows, to being a seed saver, who sets things back for coming years. The last time I picked that plant, I got 44 tender pods in one morning. That was the day I decided to set it aside to bare seeds; that takes several weeks time though. Despite my best efforts, it was killed by an early hard freeze shortly after that photo was taken. I only salvaged 5 pods of mature okra seeds from it, most of which I donated to OSU for use at their experimental agriculture research station.

That was the year I learned to be more cautious, to share with others, and to grow seed crops in multiple locations to insure survival from the rigors and steady onslaught of nature. The year I grew that plant, I had planted 1,500 Heavy Hitter okra seeds. That plant was one of about six that survived a tornado, a flood of 22' inches of rain in 11 days, an ice storm the 1st of May, a drought that started the next day, and lasted for over a year, a wildfire that burned several homes to the ground, driving legions of grasshoppers ahead of it, 65 consecutive days over 100 degrees, two weeks over 110 degrees, one day that hit 115 degrees, Japanese Beetles, and deer predation, only to be killed by a freak storm that brought sustained temperatures in the low 20s nearly a month ahead of schedule. I nearly lost a decade worth of work in the span of one night.

Because of the wildfire that drove so many grasshoppers ahead of it, we spent the next two years going out at night with flashlights and gathering about 3,000 to 5,000 grasshoppers per trip. There were so many that they ate the bark off the apple trees, killing an entire orchard within a few weeks. George had the idea of gathering them with a wet-vac, which worked very well once I got power to the garden 500' feet from the house. We found out by and by, that the best way to catch grasshoppers was to go out just before dawn, while they were still slow from cool temperatures, and grab them a handful at a time, feeding them to the suction hose of a portable wet-vac that I made from a 5 gallon bucket.

[heavyhitterokra]

This is a post in reference to the record-setting 1999, F5 tornado that was on the ground in the Moore/Oklahoma City area for approximately 38 miles in total, from Chickasha, through south Oklahoma City, and the suburbs of Bridge Creek, Newcastle, Moore, Midwest City and Del City. It occurred on the evening of May 3rd, 1999, at around 6:23 pm and lasted for 1 hour and 25 minutes.  Eyewitnesses at the time claimed it to be a 'walking tornado' in that at one point it had split in two, forming two, crisscrossing 'legs' referred to by the people we talked to, as a "Dead Man Walking."

In places, the devastation was over a mile wide. The F5 tornado that night currently holds the record for the highest sustained wind ever recorded on earth, with top speeds of 302+-20 mph as measured by mobile Doppler Radar. It claimed 36 lives, (+5 more indirectly). It heavily damaged or destroyed A total of 8,132 homes, 1,041 apartments, 260 businesses, 11 public buildings, and 7 churches. Estimated damage costs totaled $1.2 billion, making it the first recorded tornado in history to exceed $1 billion in total estimated damages. The destruction from the Bridge Creek−Moore portion of the tornado produced an estimated 220 cubic yards (170 m3) of debris from the buildings that were destroyed there in that single, semi-rural setting. 

When we first heard news of it, my two oldest boys and I were so moved, that I decided to take off work, and they decided to take leave from school, to go there to render aid for two weeks; along with a group of volunteers from our Church in Tahlequah.  My boys were 12 and 15 years old at the time. The first place we were assigned to was Bridge Creek. I remember that the Red Cross sent us to an address in Bridge Creek that first day that we were unable to locate, due to the absence of street signs; as not even a mailbox was left there still standing when we arrived.

The winds there had scoured the grass off the ground, sucking the barbed wire fences right out of the muddy soil. There was barbed wire tangled in the treetops for miles in the direction of the 'fall out' from the high winds. At one point, the pavement had been sucked up off the ground. The asphalt from the highway leading to Bridge Creek was uprooted and lying to the side of where the highway used to be. We drove across bare ground to reach what was left of the remaining pavement. 

There were vast expanses of bare ground there, where nothing was left, save for concrete slabs, broken water pipes, and electrical conduits, with the wires pulled out of them where houses once stood.  Most of the grass in that area was gone, leaving bare, wet ground, where once there were happy, green lawns.

The few twisted trees that remained were completely denuded and debarked, leaving only their contorted trunks and a few bare limbs representing specters of their former selves. The wood of those tree trunks appeared as if the trees had been 'unwound' for lack of a better word, like every fiber in their being had been frayed, resembling what you might expect if they had been made of loosely twisted hemp rope.  The entire area was swept nearly clean of debris, though you could plainly see the concrete slabs of many missing homes.

Although the immediate area was swept clean by the storm, the tree line a half-mile away was littered with sheet metal, plywood, insulation, clothing, blankets, sheets, pillow cases, curtains, stuffed animals, children's toys, and shingles, for as far as the eye could see.

The houses that survived, a few miles away from the main path of destruction, were caked in debris.  There were huge chunks of muddy sod and grass that had fallen from the sky.  This debris had spattered everything in the storm's leeward path.  The angry skies had dumped huge loads of bricks, concrete blocks, old tires, plywood, car parts, refrigerators, washers, dryers, hot water tanks, tree limbs, swing sets, dead chickens, crippled cats, or anything else that might have been airborne the night before.  We saw a really nice brick home, some miles away; appearing to be otherwise undamaged; on the roof over the garage portion of that house, rested an S-10 Chevy Blazer, looking just as if someone had parked it there, buried to the frame in their rafters.

We saw cars and trucks there that had been rolled along the ground for such a long distance that nothing was left of any of them except for the engines, attached to a crumpled transmission, or maybe parts of the frame.  I remember a barren street in Bridge Creek, where there was a message scrawled in spray paint along the curbside that read, "I survived the night inside this tin horn."  The destruction there was surreal. It's a wonder anyone survived at all.

Since there was nothing we could do in Bridge Creek, as what was left of the town was deserted and there were no homes nearby that could be restored, we drove a few miles farther down the road and stopped to help an elderly couple who had lost nearly every shingle from their entire roof.  It was an older home, built of native sandstone.  There was a huge lintel stone above the doorway bearing the date 1907. It was very well built, having once had a cedar shake shingle roof, it now had only the 1x4 lattice frame work left.  It was a very steeply pitched roof with two glass windowed dormers.  It had a 13/12 pitch and at that steep angle, took some expertise to ascend.  As the farmer owning the house was busy spraying gasoline in the attic, to kill the hoards of red wasps that lived under the lattice, we got busy bolting angle iron to the top of a twenty-foot aluminum extension ladder to form an 'L' to hook over the peak of the roof and propped the other end of the ladder in the back of a pickup truck, so it had a good support.  We tied lariat ropes around our waists and anchored them on the opposite side of the roof, so we couldn't fall off, then we began the task of re-roofing their home with sheet metal that they had on pallets near the house where they had planned on building a new barn.

After taking a few initial measurements, to assess how much sheet metal it would take, we drove our truck around the old barn lot to load the sheet metal.  While there, we saw the old couple's wheat combine.  There was a blue Ford tractor smashed through the combine's enclosed cab.  The combine's header bars and sickle teeth, were folded into a 'V' shape, making it look like a giant catcher's mitt with a ford tractor being caught, in place of a fast ball. 

One of the craziest things I saw on the entire trip was a mama goose, still sitting on her clutch of eggs there in the middle of that elderly couple's empty barn lot.  The goose was inside an old tire, within a few yards of the combine.  I had been picking up debris, scattered around the destroyed combine and came across a piece of sheet metal that looked like it might still be usable in repairing the barn nearby.  When I leaned over to pick up the edge of the sheet metal, I uncovered the hissing mother goose; still safely tucked away in her nest...  Clutching my chest from having been startled half to death, I set the sheet metal quietly back in place, leaving the mother goose to her peaceful little abode.  Somehow, a wind so strong that it could toss a Ford tractor like a salad had left that little goose undisturbed.

In summary, the memory of the heartbreak and devastation that we witnessed there still brings a tear to my eye twenty some-odd years later.  Though sad, the time we spent there was very rewarding in the form of blessings that we received from being able to offer assistance.  Most of what we accomplished was in the way of re-roofing houses in rural areas.  (Bridge Creek was not one of those areas) as there were no houses there still intact.  All we accomplished on day one in the Bridge Creek area was in helping area residents pick up debris and load their belongings onto our trucks.  There were forklifts stacking smashed vehicles like cordwood, so trucks were hard to come by.  We had brought two trucks with us.  They came in very handy there.

There were thirteen of us who drove there from our Church, mostly youth.  We had a 15 passenger van, a couple of trucks, and an old '84 Pontiac Grand Prix, loaded with tools.  It took a couple of days to get things lined out, like where to find power for the power tools we brought along. (There were no generators left in the hardware stores).  We had no place to stay because there were no hotels available, so we slept on the ground under our van, or in, and under our trucks.  Area restaurants were shutdown because there was no refrigeration.  There were few places left to eat, none in the immediate area; so we'd have to drive several miles to find food. 

There was Marshal Law, so our trucks would be searched every evening as we left our worksites.  Finally, after many nights of getting rained on, and many days of sunburned necks, no showers, and no solid food, we got invited to sleep inside, on the bare floor of the game room, at a Baptist Boy's Home.  They had a kitchen, so there was a way to cook our meals after a hard day's work. We were so glad of that!  I remember many of us having a fever from bad sunburns and how cold that concrete floor felt, but it was still way better than sleeping on the bare ground under our trucks.

I think that experience will help me for the rest of my life.  It was truly a blessing to see so many people pulling together to help one another in anyway that they could.

This is a news clip from KFOR Live, from the night of the EF5 tornado as it swept through Moore, heading Northeast toward Del City. 
 

[heavyhitterokra]

It's odd how tornadoes can be such a micro-regional thing, hitting one place and not another. An example of that is that there has never been a tornado to hit the city of Tahlequah in recorded History, even though the town of Peggs, 15.7 miles away was wiped off the map by a tornado in 1920...

My first wife was a Cherokee/Pottawatomie cross. Her grandma, a full blood (born in the 1890s) swore tornados came to this region with the 'white men.' She firmly believed they never existed before that.

I'm pretty sure there were plenty of tornadoes in Oklahoma, way before there were any white men here. People around here probably just never heard of them before there was radio and television.

[heavyhitterokra]

Wikipedia had a pretty good write-up about the February 13-17, 2021 freeze across the Southern States.  According to their article here:
[4][5][6] The damages from the blackouts are estimated to be at least $195 billion (2021 USD), making the system the costliest natural disaster in the recorded history of Texas and the United States as a whole.

[macmex]

Ron, I suspect your former mother-in-law's perspective was more on account of an earlier lack of communication. Tornados would touch down, but they were not reported, at least not frequently. In my whole life I've only SEEN one, and that was out in the Panhandle of Texas. Yet I'm pretty sure they've passed nearby a number of times.

[heavyhitterokra]

I've lived here in 'Tornado Alley' all of my life and have never actually seen a real tornado before. (Knock wood).

The closest I've ever come to one was while working a job in Hamburg, Pennsylvania. While there, a small tornado apparently passed over the hotel where I was staying one Sunday afternoon in mid-July.   I remember seeing the sky turn black, then looking out the window just in time to see the stop sign out at the end of the parking lot as the wind laid it flat on the ground. As soon as I saw that, I grabbed whatever blankets and pillows I could and dived into the bathtub, thinking "This is it!"

While I was lying there in the tub with the covers pulled over my head, I was thinking, "Oh the irony! To have lived in Oklahoma my whole life and then get killed by a tornado in a fleabag hotel halfway across the Country."

I never saw the tornado, but I did hear it pass by. (They really do sound like a freight train). It was incredibly loud! It shook the whole building!  It only lasted a few seconds and then it was over. There was a loud crash and all the lights went out.  When I got out of the tub and went rushing back outside, there were two huge pine trees that had crashed through the roof of the building and all of the porch lights were knocked off the broken brick veneer out front. 

In that moment, I saw the hotel manager go whisking past my door, on his way to go kick out the tree trimming crew that had been staying there for free, in exchange for removing the two pine trees that were now crashed through his roof.

The pool was full of debris and my van had broken branches on top of it, but back in '87 vehicles were built of better stuff, so there wasn't even a dent in the sheet metal.

[chrysanthemum]

The weather forecast this morning was calling for a 100% chance of heavy storms this evening with the possibility of high winds and hail.  I decided to pull out the shade cloth a few weeks early in the hopes that if there is hail (but not too much) that it will help protect my plants.  It was a lot of work to get up, so I don’t know if I’ll want to pull it down again.  My original plan had been to put it up on Memorial Day.  

The forecast now has changed so the storm chances are lessening.  I’ll gladly do without hail, but I was really hoping for some good rain.  We’ll see.  There’s lightning about 25 miles away, and my head has been hurting all day with what I call a “barometric pressure headache.”  Sometimes that will go away once storms move through.

[heavyhitterokra]

Wow! chrysanthemum, that's a really nice setup! What all do you have growing under there?

Here, the weather has been really dark and dreary most of the day. I went out this morning to pull more weeds. I didn't get much accomplished though before it started raining. By the time I got back up to the house, it was coming down pretty hard.  We've had some pea sized hail today, but not anything bad. Our high here today has only been 50 degrees though, so it hasn't been a good day to keep working in the rain.

I had brain surgery back in '98. They put three metal plates in the side of my head along with 6 screws to hold the bone in place. I know what you mean by those barometric pressure headaches, though as I get older, my back aches from the weather a lot more than my head does.

I'll really be glad when all this cloudy/rainy weather clears back up. I was in hopes of finishing my weed pulling project in the next day or so. That's all be put on hold now though. Oh well, the muddy ground will make my job all that much easier when the sun comes back out.

[chrysanthemum]

Thanks for the kind words, you two. I’m afraid it’s a bit more makeshift than it looks in that picture. We need to get some more clamps to make it more secure. It has been less sunny than usual in our part of the world this week, so it seems strange to have the shade cloth up. The plants seem perfectly happy, though, and the forecast is suggesting another possibility of severe storms including hail for the weekend, so I’m leaving it in place.

I’ll try to list what I’ve got growing there. Keep in mind that for some of these things, there’s really very little in the garden. I plant pretty intensively, but I’m still dealing with only about 300 square feet.

Asparagus
Kale
Swiss Chard
Beets
Heavy Hitter Okra
Corn
Sweet Potatoes
Yukon Gold Potatoes
Rattlesnake Pole Bean
Zucchini
Green Onions
Crawford Lettuce
Dill
Cilantro
Parsley
Bulbing Onions
Tomatoes
Cucumbers
Peppers
1 Cabbage
1 Daikon Radish
1 Sunflower
A few Zinnias
1 Marigold

[heavyhitterokra]

Nice!

A backyard grocery store. I like that.

[chrysanthemum]

I like that term, “backyard grocery store.”  It has been a blessing this week.  We’ve harvested and eaten two bunches of chard, a bunch of beets and greens, lettuce, and zucchini and onions.

I forgot to mention that I have two small pumpkins and two butternut squash plants started as well.

Today has the potential for more strong storms, and I saw a weather article that indicates that that potential for “nasty” weather goes all the way up to northern Oklahoma.  Two things we often pray for around here are rain and lack of violent weather.  We’ll be praying for safety across the plains today.

Heavyhitterokra, I appreciated the story you shared about the Bridge Creek tornado and glad that you and your boys were able to serve during that time.  I watched just a bit of the clip but found it too upsetting, even though it was long in the past.  I did a little research about that time because I had noted that the tornado date was the same as one that struck Mulhall (the town where my grandmother was born way back before Oklahoma was a state).  It was shocking to read about the huge number of tornados that hit in that one week of May, and though it’s hard to read of any deaths, it was rather amazing to learn how few lives were taken given the enormity of the destruction that week.  

[heavyhitterokra]

Nothing quite like severe weather to put things in perspective. We saw things after that '99 tornado that I would not have thought possible. We saw several vehicles rolled by wind until all that was left of them could have fit inside a 55-gallon drum.

Back in 1992, I was driving an '84 Pontiac Grand Prix as a tornado passed through the Muskogee Fort Gibson area. It was right at the end of our shift at Fort Howard Paper Mill and about 500 people were trying to get out of the parking lot at the same time. I remember how the sky turned black and driving rains, and wind, hurling rocks across the gravel parking lot around us. I had my foot on the brake as hard as I could mash it down and the car was still being blown across the parking lot by the hurricane-force winds. That's an eerie feeling to have your car pushed across the parking lot with you in it. I thought of that a lot while seeing the remains of vehicles in the Bridge Creek area.