Tag Archives: weather

forecasting the future with our friend the wooly bear caterpillar?

forecasting the future with our friend the wooly bear caterpillar?

what does our friend the wooly bear caterpillar ( larval stage of the Pyrrharctia isabella ) tell us about the upcoming winter? according to the farmer’s almanac the caterpillar’s relatively narrow brown band ( it’s hard to tell from this angle that’s narrow ) means we’ll get heavier than normal snow and its not particularly fat or fuzzy which means we’ll have a relatively mild winter in terms of temperature. so, snowy but not too cold. sounds perfect!

we’ll check back in the spring and see how accurate a forecaster our wooly bear caterpillar friend was.

something wicked this way comes.

something wicked this way comes.

driving slowly down a country road overloaded with black locust, a line of clouds appeared and i wondered if maybe things are going to get even trickier.

i was pretty sure a tornado was going to drop out of the line of clouds that stretched as far as the eye could see.

happily, no tornadoes appeared, but it did start dumping down rain which made unloading the wood even more fun!

the dramatic drought disaster and complicated corn sex

it’s record breaking hot all over and meteorologists predict the drought is only going to get worse on the same week usda declared the largest natural disaster area ever due to drought ( more than 1,000 counties covering 26 states ) because, well, “corn sex is complicated…the whole affair is so freakishly difficult it’s hard to imagine how it ever evolved in the first place…” and the drought isn’t making it any easier.