Yesterday got up to 17°C, making it the warmest Chicago Thanksgiving since 1966. And then this happened, as predicted:
It's now -1°C with 40 km/h wind gusts and a wind chill of -8°C. Even Parker looked annoyed this morning on his first walk, squinting into the wind with his ears flopping behind his head. It's amazing how little time he wastes in this kind of weather, compared with his need to sniff every square centimeter of Lincoln Park when it's nice out. (Or raining, for some reason. Must be nice, having a fur coat.)
We probably won't hit the record November 22 temperature (21°C, set in 1913), but we'll get awfully close. It's already 15°C at O'Hare, with a forecast of 18°C—followed by a cold front and 0°C by morning.
Parker and I will therefore now go for a long walk.
Chicago is enjoying its 14th consecutive month of above-average sunshine, along with some unseasonable warmth leading into Thanksgiving (13°C right now, 17°C on Thursday).
Earlier today the NWS Climate Prediction Center released a new 90-day forecast predicting normal temperatures and precipitation in Chicago through February:
This is all fine by us. Though we do hope for a mild winter...
Starting before 8am with an international conference call usually means I'll have a full day. Fortunately there's Instapaper, which lets me shove all the interesting things I find during the day onto my Android pad for tomorrow's bus ride to work.
So far today:
- The Guardian's Glenn Greenwald worries more about surveillance than any other part of the Petreaus scandal.
- Wunderground's Jeff Masters explains all the superlatives around Hurricane Sandy.
- Philip Bump, writing at Gristmill, thinks politicians should pay more attention to climate change.
- Nate Silver, having put the election behind him, turns his attention to the American League MVP race.
- The Chicago Board of Elections apparently exposed my personal information along with that of the other 1.7 million voters in the city. (Since voter registration information is public in Illinois, this is actually not a real story. But oooooh! Information breach! Scary hackers!)
- Chicago restaurant L20, which shares an alley with my apartment building, got its second Michelin star back. I ate there once, last May, and was very impressed. Not as impressed as the check would have suggested, but impressed nonetheless.
And...now back to work.
In the past 24 hours, the temperature here dropped from 21°C at 2pm yesterday to -2°C at 8am today. The cold front responsible drove the temperature down 6°C in three hours at one point, making for uncomfortable walks home from dinner.
We had two delightful September days, but now it's November again. The Climate Prediction Center expects normal temperatures in Chicago through the end of January. Winter is coming...
NOAA has put up an interactive map of aerial photos they took Wednesday, Thursday, and yesterday.
The Weather Channel has some doozies.
And the Peoria Journal has a round-up of photos as well.
Josh Marshall checks in from the disaster:
What I found so surreal about this storm is that in Manhattan at least there really was barely a storm at all. For whatever reason, through the period when there was the worst part of the damage the ‘rain’ never got worse than maybe a slight drizzle. Really no more than that. It got windy. But not all that windy either — though there were definitely gusts that were quite unlike anything normal. So through Monday night everything was pretty normal — just a wet and dreary Fall evening. Except for the fact that if you walked into certain parts of the city, you walked into the ocean.
It was a vaguely carnival-like atmosphere. Certainly it was the topography. But the water had stopped right at the eastward edge of 10th Avenue, almost like the cops had told it: this far, no further bub. A scattered crowd of people were out just taking in the sight. Cars who apparently hadn’t heard we were in the midst of a Hurricane kept coming up only to be turned around by two or three NYPD cars there to block off the area. Oh, then there’s that woman riding up the avenue on her bicycle. Over the bullhorn the cops let her know that that probably wasn’t a hot idea since the water can be electrified.
Meanwhile, Paul Krugman wonders why the right wingers hate FEMA:
So let me just take a moment to flag an issue others have been writing about: the weird Republican obsession with killing FEMA. Kevin Drum has the goods: they just keep doing it. George Bush the elder turned the agency into a dumping ground for hacks, with bad results; Clinton revived the agency; Bush the younger ruined it again; Obama revived it again; and Romney — with everyone still remembering Brownie and Katrina! — said that he wants to block-grant and privatize it. (And as far as I can tell, even TV news isn’t letting him Etch-A-Sketch the comment away).
There’s something pathological here. It’s really hard to think of a public service less likely to be suitable for privatization, and given the massive inequality of impacts by state, it really really isn’t block-grantable. Does the right somehow imagine that only Those People need disaster relief? Is the whole idea of helping people as opposed to hurting them just anathema?
The only thing that makes sense is, there's a lot of profit in helping disaster victims, isn't there?
The storm's destruction in the Northeast is mind-blowing. I lived in Hoboken, N.J., for about a year and a half; the entire city is in the flood zone.
Just a link round-up for now; thoughts later:
More later.
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(Water floods the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel in lower Manhattan. Photo by Andrew Burton/Getty Images.)
Way back in January 2006, the longest hurricane season ever to blow through the North Atlantic led to some off the wall updates from the National Hurricane Center. Today webcomic xkcd relives the experience. It's worth a quick read.