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I copied and pasted your above post to my FB page, Floyd, and made sure to source it to you. Thank you for the great info!
Hey, that's great! I'll have to go look. :-)
Incidentally, most of the data in that article came from a program I wrote about 15 years ago. I was trying to come up with something that would give me the exact same times for minutes of daylight gained or lost each day when compared with what the Fairbanks Daily-News Miner prints from the National Weather Service. I could never figure out how to get an exact match over an entire year. A fudge here would make it match for 3 months or so, but for the other 9 months it would be off, and a different fudge there would just change which 3 months matched. I gave up. (I have no idea how the NWS computes their data, but the main point is that nobody else has the exact same numbers either!)
After I moved to Barrow I happened to notice some odd quirks in the data tables that the NOAA site was providing (ten years ago, but it's probably still the same), and had a very interesting conversation with the guy who wrote their program. The quirks I'd noticed were well known, and the result of optimizing to make it generate a table fast enough (it could have been more accurate, but the viewer would be asleep when it finished). He was very interested in my visual observation to corroborate the data our different programs produced. We were both very nearly the same, and closer than I was able to judge visually.
Looks like the near shore ice stayed put, but the ice just past that is gone.
Sort of. There is a pretty big open lead between the shore fast ice and everything that is free floating. The reason is because the wind shifted back from North or NNE (which pushes it towards shore) to NE or E, which pushes it away from shore. I didn't look at the webcam, but in fact the open water is not really very wide, and there is ice clearly visible in the distance.
We are just starting to see some cold temps too. It's touching right on 0F now, and is supposed to dip well below that in the next couple days, and then on Wednesday be back up close to 20F again. Petty warm for this time of year, over all.
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Off topic, but how is electricity produced up there? What is the power goes out?
We are sitting on a huge natural gas reservoir. All it takes is drilling a 1400 foot deep hole, and lots of gas comes out for years.
The result is that heat and electricity are both fairly inexpensive here. The cost is something like 10 cents a KWHour (I haven't checked exactly what it is for a long time, but that's close). Roughly that is the same cost as electricity in Anchorage.
There are multiple generators supplying power, so our power is very reliable. The usual cause of an outage would be a line problem, not with generation. A wind storm blowing things into lines, some truck hitting a power pole, or similar odd causes are the usual reason for interruptions. Outages are rare, and usually power is restored in less than two hours. And that is because the power company is well aware that, at least in the winter, anything longer than 3 or 4 hours is all but a total disaster for most users. They spare no effort.
The first page is a bit much on drama, perhaps (but almost precisely accurate, so certainly it describes what someone from the Lower-48 will see the first time in Barrow), but the next 4 pages are just absolutely well done. Probably the best article of that kind that I've ever seen on Barrow and the North Slope.
Or maybe the tundra is melting and a few brains got frozen.
When a grade school reading program has to be cut back due to lack of funds while half a million dollars is spent to play football, somebody needs a reality check. Teaching violence to our children is not culture appropriate in Barrow either.
Or maybe the tundra is melting and a few brains got frozen.
When a grade school reading program has to be cut back due to lack of funds while half a million dollars is spent to play football, somebody needs a reality check. Teaching violence to our children is not culture appropriate in Barrow either.
So I'm guessing the great football debate is still going on? I thought the program was being expanded to to middle school and flag foot ball too because of it's popularity. Has the high school graduation rate improved at all? I personally see football as giving the kids something to do rather than get in trouble. I wouldn't want reading to suffer for it though. What type of program was cut? I mean I doubt they cut reading out of the school day, right?
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