You know it's cold when....
 

OK.

I am NOT MAKING THIS UP!

You know it's cold when......

1) You can't take your forklift apart because the blizzard keeps making your socket set disappear.

2) You can't plug in your block heater because the cover is frozen on.


Both of these have actually happened to me.
Do you have a TRUE "you know it's cold when"?

It's 72 degrees outside right now... according to my thermometer.... :shrug:

You know it's cold when...

There's a dense fog covering the city from exhaust outlets in every car and building.

Today was only about -10*C though, practically T-shirt weather :D.

If it's snowing, it's not that cold :D

(I feel I should add, I know it's not the cold directly that causes the lack of snow at lower temperatures but too much dynamic stability...)

I put my winter coat away when it reached -10F figiring that it was summer already, but it's still cold enough that my clutch is slow to engauge, and it takes 5+ miles for my temp gauge to read anything, or heat to come out of the defrost.

It is actually a myth that it gets "too cold to snow" - it just happens to be more rare when it is both really cold AND snowing. It doesn't snow much in Antarctica because it's a desert, NOT because it's cold.

Don't forget to factor in wind-chill!

I wouldn't call it a myth, I'd say just more of a norm for weather.

Weather tends to be clear and cold (high pressure) or warm and wet (low pressure).

not as interesting or funny...
you know its cold when neither of your vehicles want to start (cranking for 5-10 secs:( )

You know it's cold when you can pour liquid propane in a glass.

As for the "too cold to snow" statement, I'm with Who on that one. I can't remember the last time it was -30 and snowing here. With the global warming trend, we are expecting to have even MORE snow in the winter around here as the mean temperature for the winter goes up towards 0.

Edit: All temps in Celcius

I was trying to avoid this, hence my footnote, but if you want to get technical, -20F it's too cold for most snow to happen. At -40F you can get snow but without nuclei, but it's nothing like the snow we commonly experience - it's significantly smaller.

Around -5F there begins to be an extreme lack of vapor in the air, that is it snows before it hits the air mass at this temperature, often on the front, because the colder mass isn't capable of holding that amount of water - that's what the dew point is all about. Saturated air is capable of reaching Antarctica, and may soon in coming years if it warms up. Besides the fact no saturated air makes it over the region, its cold enough that even in sunlight, little water evaporates and therefore little precipitation can ever occur. Add to that the temperature gradient is minimal promoting dynamic stability, it becomes impossible for it to snow under these temperature conditions.

Parts of Vermont are getting hammered with snow this year because it is warmer than normal. Normally the moisture encounters the Arctic/Canadian air mass and falls before it can get to us, but not this winter...

I know when it is to cold, by setting a boiling pot of water outside and when it freezes it is still warm. J/K

"Ice fog"? I've seen it on the prairies in extreme cold. I'm sure Peakster can talk about it. :D

Speaking of snow nuclei (don't say that very often), I happened to see this news item yesterday:

Funny! :)

I did see something this morning I've never seen before. Not coincidentally, over night was one of the coldest temps of the winter so far here (-21 ish C - balmy compared to Winnipeg).

I could see the breath of individual chickadees foraging around the bird feeder. Never noticed that before.

I've felt -40's before, but only at night and I never saw this ice fog... I guess I can be thankful this winter is warm and we've only hit the -10'sF really. Unfortunately the warmer temperatures have allowed a LOT more precipitation to reach us and snow...

That article you quote reminds me of the red rain in India that they found out was probably clouds seeded heavily with some strange bacteria and they were arguing over whether it was terrestrial in origin or not. A lot of studies have come up recently studying the effects of Gobi desert dust storms and how they affect our climate, especially Atlantic hurricanes.

Ice fog photo: http://epod.usra.edu/archive/epodviewer.php3?oid=170240

I've seen a lot of those pillars at night this winter along the St-Lawrence River between Quebec and Montreal and was wondering what it was, but never got around to actually find out. Thanks.

You know its cold when you stuff trash in the grill of your car to keep warm,

When 3 hours on the block heater doesn't move the temp gauge at all.

When your electric car won't hold a full charge

And when you can let the dog off the leash because he runs back to the house in 35 seconds anyway,

You know it's cold when F*** I just forgot mine...and I laughed so hard thinking about it.

You know it's cold when even your EV won't start!

You know it's cold when your (community) wireless Internet service becomes really fast... On the first day it got "cold" in College Station, which is about 55F, I was surprised that my Linux torrents were going at 500KB/s! It usually runs at 100KB/s on a good summer day and performance is really variable (from ~150KB/s to nothing!) on rainy days regardless of the temperature...

Really, it's sad that much of Texas has practically no real winter... So to test the theory about Broadcom routers performing better in cold weather, I'm having my best friend Allie Moore take a Linksys WRT54G V3 running OpenWRT to Chicago over the break for some real cold weather testing. (Maybe the BCM4712 platform performs better below freezing just like the Pentium 3 I refrigerated for my Science Fair project...)

Here in Texas, I have to use technology to get a temperature much below freezing, even during the winter. Up north, going well below freezing is free - just take it outside! (There's an old saying: "The best overclockers are from Russia.")

My WiFi Gear (WRT54GL's) don't seem to care what the Temperature is. Rain hurts my link a good bit . . . Now overclockers

I know it's cold when the golf has difficulty starting on B-100

I know it's cold and wet when I have a hard time keeping my coolant temperature over 130 F on the interstate while fighting to keep the windshield de frosted and freezing my but off.

I can't imagine what you guys go through up north.

This side of the equator it is now 26 C and expected to be a little warmer at32 C tomorrow.

Pete.

That's only about 100 degrees F warmer than here!

Um, you know it's cold when the inversion layer is lower than the overpass.
...when I toss a cup of 140* water and it never hits the ground.
....when I have a photo of Fred Myers sign stating it's -55*F.
...when a 2-stroke air cooled motor can't warm up.
...When you welcome -20* with shorts and longsleeves.
...when you understand the pain of the joke
"it gets to -X* here."
"Celcuis or Fahrenheit?"
"First one, then the other"
...when Frank is probably the only one here who understands personally what I've said.
...when you know I'm not lying about any of this.


It just doesn't get very cold in MT, at least compared to AK.
When I find the picture of the -55*, I'll post it up somewhere.

I know it's cold when the polar bears outside my window dive below the ice to warm up.;)

Just kidding. Everyone knows polar bears are extinct.:D (In Colorado they are.)

You know it's cold "...when you leave behind yellow ice cycles in the outhouse..."

You know it's cold when u get a cup of water to see if the myth is true about it "freezing before it hits the ground", and before u can pour the water out, right after u step outside it actually freezes inside the cup. *True story from a few years ago.

When you get frost bite while taking your glove off to unlock the door

when your dog takes one step outside turns around and goes to hide under the couch

when you scrape your window, get back in start the car only to realize you need to scrape the window again (both inside and out)

when the jet does not come because the fuel will gel.

your tires are out of round and stay that way.

you get a 4 inch layer of ice condensing on the inside of your windows.

...when you see the moose meandering down main street in Cicely, Alaska (wink,wink)!

Stock network hardware should perform properly throughout their temperature specifications. The WRT54G V3 in question was overclocked. (And it has heatsinks installed on the CPU and RF circuits.) I had it set to 120mW, which is about where it starts becoming a little unstable in Texas weather.

Earlier today, Allie got to Chicago and set up the router in an unheated shed. It is about 10-20F there and the router has ran flawlessly for 4 hours so far, with a streaming IP camera to provide a load. If it is still running the next day, she'll use the debugging console to turn it up in 10mW increments until it becomes unstable or has reached the high limit. (The OpenWRT group does not recommend overclocking due to possibility of hardware damage. I told her to not worry if she breaks it, since it is for research.)

Really?

You know it's cold when....



we start wearing jackets and making hot cocoa

at 60(ish) degrees or so

Allright --- I spent 3 years in Minneapolis and now 13 years in Tucson AZ so I can jump in on both sides. I'll wait till Aug and start a "YKIHW". Never give up a chance to create an Acronym.
YKICW: You fill the tank when it gets to 3/4 because you want enough gas to last all night if you get stuck somewhere.

You put a water bottle in your cup holder and it is frozen when you try to drink from it.

...yes, but right about now is the time for our Aussie and Kiwi friends to start putting your new acronym, You Know It's Hot When (YKIHW), to good use!

..."take it away, down under!"

Ha Ha! Last year I wintered in Cali; everyone was scurrying around with these huge winter jackets and hats while I had a great time bicycling all over in my shorts!

Yes sir...it was a wicked cold day that day. I can't remember the actual ambient temp but i know it was below 0° F with the wind chill at -50 to -60° F. If i'm not mistaken the state declared a state of emergency that day.

lol they don't even cancel recess here till 25 below. I think they made school optional last year when it hit 60 below

Yeah, but then you know its REALLY cold when the net is slower because it's too cold for the die hard outdoors folks and everybody is on.

I remember reading that back when 802.11b was just coming out, a certain AP chipset (Serena?) would not operate properly outdoors in cold weather as the PLL is unable to adjust far enough. (The engineers never thought the AP would be used outdoors!) If you're unlucky, it would operate at the frequency of another network and end up doing an unintended DoS attack on it. The fix was a thin film heater affixed to the wireless module, which was not very efficient but it resolved the issue.