The Big Chill

Today is the Winter Solstice, the shortest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, and here in Connecticut things are appropriately miserable.

Most of the eastern seaboard got hammered by a pre-Christmas blizzard this past weekend, and even though our area got off light compared to the shore, Old Man Winter is making up for a lack of snow with screaming winds and frigid temperatures. It's sunny out, but the sunshine is thin and brittle, lacking any real warmth. It'll be gone by four thirty, and once more, we'll wait through the long cold night.

This recent spate of brutally cold days has got me thinking again of the climate. Although, with the recent Copenhagen talks keeping NPR abuzz, warming should be foremost in my mind, I find myself thinking instead about the cold. Why, for instance, is Connecticut this cold this time of year?

The answer isn't as obvious as you might think. Our latitude here is roughly 41 degrees North; Litchfield, CT and Rome, Italy, are equally far north, yet I doubt they're shoveling out the Trevi Piazza right now. Why should we here in North America be subjected to ice and snow while Europe (and for that matter, continents inversely just as far south) are left with much more moderate weather?

The factors are many and complicated, I'm sure, but the one that I think of the most, and which seems to make the most sense, I first read about in a book called The Eternal Frontier, written by a scientist named Tim Flannery. The book is an exhaustive and exhausting history of the entire North American continent (penned by an Aussie, no less), from its Pangaean days to it's colonization by proto-Indians and eventually Europeans. One of the key shaping features of North America has always been its climate, and its climate, as espoused by Flannery, has largely been driven by geography.

In its shape, Flannery likens North America to a big 'climatic trumpet'; can you see it? The continent flares at the top and tapers at the bottom, and on either side run mighty mountain chains in the form of the Rockies and the Appalachians. What this shape does is funnel weather north and south with little to no interruption from east-west mountain obstacles. In the winter, cold air from the arctic is free to come surging down through the trumpet's bell, and in the summer, pressure gradients pull warm air up from the trumpet's Mexican mouthpiece. With this wide open geographic arrangement, vast and dramatic annual temperature swings are not only possible, but common place.

Which is why, in six scant months, the temperature here in Connecticut will be balmy and pleasant. Temperature variations of up to 100 degrees within a single year are entirely possible, even here in New England, which doesn't even have the climatic extremes of, say, Montana. Think about that for a minute: it's in the teens outside right now, yet July will bring days when it reaches the nineties. What's truly amazing to me is that the North American ecosystems have all developed to withstand such egregious swings. The flora and fauna of the continent are all adapted to survive both the cold and the heat and humidity, and to go from one to the other in basically the blink of chronological eye. It's all sort of amazing in its brutality and elegance...that anything, from an oak tree to a deer mouse, can live in such a climate.

But today, most of that amazement is lost on me. It's damn cold out, but even in the worst of the weather, I must bundle up and go out into the teeth of the wind to feed and water the animals. The sun will abandon us too soon, and the night will be clear and freezing. I know, in the back of my mind, that spring will come, and all this wind and snow will make the inevitable summer all that much sweeter. But today, sitting inside now and listening to that wind scour the fields, those summer days can't possibly come soon enough...