Photos: A.M.Mueller.
Date Taken: January 25th 2014
Location: Skilak Lake, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska
The weather pattern favoring relentless cold in the Eastern states and prolonged warmth in the West will continue through the end of January.
On multiple dates this month, temperatures have been warmer in Alaska than they have been in Texas, Louisiana and much of the Atlantic coast, including Florida.
Nome, Alaska, which lies at 64.5 degrees north latitude has experienced at least seven days so far this month where temperatures have climbed above freezing. The normal high for Nome is 13 F.
Read what Jeff Masters has to say about this.
http://www.wunderground.com/blog/JeffMasters/article.html?entrynum=2620
1) Nothing to see here. Please move along, buddy.
2) Imagine next summer’s mosquito crop!
Imagine this years pine beetle crop (and so) imagine coming years forest fires
“Nothing to see here, move along” is not quite true—the old saw about “one picture is worth a thousand words” instead prevails. I have always been partial to “visual displays of graphic information” and do like this post—-colors and numbers overlaid on maps is the way to get my attention.
Two of the best books I have ever put on my shelves are by Edward R. Tufte. “The Visual Display of Graphic Information” (1983), and “Envisioning Information” (1990). They are endlessly entertaining and get picked up every few years and looked at again.
For a look at the kind of things Tufte talks about, check out Minard’s 1861 graphic of Napoleon’s attack and retreat in Russia in 1812-13, which Tufte says “may be the best statistical graphic ever drawn”. If anyone falls in love with this graphic as I did, you can get a poster from Tufte for $14. His books are now available in paperback as well. Check his website.
studio.coe.uga.edu/seminars/visualization/minard.htmlCached
Try again
studio.coe.uga.edu/seminars/visualization/minard.html
I wish someone could explain why I have so much trouble with URL’s.
A symptom of “dumboldguyhood”, perhaps?
Google “Charles Minard’s Map of Napolean’s Russian Campaign of 1812” and you will get to the link I couldn’t get to “take”.
that’s an amazing and chilling map of what happened to the Grande Armée, the largest army assembled in previous European history. Half a million soldiers, and 20,000 returned. Appropriate to this topic, it is said Napoleon was defeated by Russian Generals Janvier and Fevrier (January and February) — that Brutal Russian Winter.
Let me try: http://studio.coe.uga.edu/seminars/visualization/minard.html
Does this work?
Here’s what I think is going on – your link doesn’t include the http:// and when it’s being sent to the web server on the remote end, that server is adding some weird characters, namely ‎ or %E2%80%8E in HTML escaped text format.
Why that’s happening is a mystery to me.
If the http:// is added, it works fine. Another method is to include only up to the final “/” in the URL which shows the files in the directory and then you can click on “minard.html”.
studio.coe.uga.edu/seminars/visualization/
That method doesn’t work very often anymore as most sites turn off directory browsing by default and blocking it has been a feature of most sites running Microsoft IIS for a long time.
Sounds good—at least the parts I understand without looking them up for further study. I noticed the missing http after I knocked off the “cached” for the second try. Your “try” worked nicely. Thanks for the help.
Napoleon was beaten long before Generals Janvier and Fevrier arrived on the scene. His army was down to ~100,000 after the battle of Borodino in early September of 1812. His army was nearly totally destroyed during the final stages of the retreat, and that was not even a particularly bad winter in Russia—no apparent “polar vortex attacks”. The cold was a big factor but the scorched earth policy in his front and the unrelenting pressure on his rear didn’t help.
And isn’t that map great? Six different variables on one plot!