Later today the rains will sluice away what’s left of our snow, and we will be back in our “open-winter.” Perhaps there’s a little symmetry at work after our burrowing February last year, but mostly I feel I’m riding a yo-yo, with its dual motions of rise and fall mixed with constant spin. Yes I know that I live in Wait-a-Minute New England, where volatility is the old normal, and yes, I know that El Nino is nosing about in the Pacific and sending, perhaps, his tears our way. Still…the everyday that touches my skin whispers that this air’s unusual. Even when the wind blusters and tries to threaten real winter, the show’s over in a day.
But my readings of Henry Thoreau’s journals remind me that his era also entertained thaws and mildness that sometimes stretched for days. His immediate weather, to which he paid close and famous attention, whispered little oddnesses too.
What Henry Thoreau didn’t have, however, was an eye in the sky; or, more accurately, a peacock fan’s worth of eyes up there. Henry Thoreau surely transcended earth in spirit and imagination, but the day-by-day parsing of change on the planet was seeable only in a local version. Our satellites, flung up at times willy nilly, have changed that – we now see not only the planet’s roundness, but also the ebbs and flows of its processes. There’s now a lot of data on looking down just a few clicks away.
The other day, I was looking back over (down on) this January past, when I came upon a thermal map of our hemisphere for those days. I looked first at where I live…of course…and noted the warmer than normal temps and nodded. But the color scheme of the whole map wouldn’t let me click on to whatever was next. Surely, I thought, the map’s inverted, upside is down, and I looked more closely: the whole arctic and subarctic region was some version of red-verging-to-darkness, meaning warmer (much) than normal; and the whole temperate portion of the US was (Maine excepted) a cool winter blue.
A screen shot of what I saw. Link at base of this piece.
I expanded the screen so the temperature scale was readable. “Look,” the sky-eye records said clearly, “Look at that.”
All of this is old news, I know. But the news sinks in variously for each of us; for me, this map remains vivid and alive in my mind, even as each day’s air and rain and snow touch my skin.
Link to vivid maps: http://models.weatherbell.com/temperature.php