Alberta, Clip Us! Clip Us!

This I eviscerated from the Mount Washington Observatory's Weather Notebook: "You may not know that its capital is Edmonton. You may not care that it's as big as Texas. But if you live east of the Rockies, you've probably heard the name Alberta on your local weathercast. This Canadian province exports a particular kind of snowstorm to the U.S. It's called an Alberta Clipper, and it brings to the Great Lakes much of their annual snowfall.

"An Alberta Clipper is born on the high plains east of the Canadian Rockies. The average clipper then dives southeast, into the Dakotas and Minnesota, and then arcs eastward across the Great Lakes. On this track, a clipper stays hundreds of miles away from the mild waters of the Atlantic or the Gulf of Mexico. This means your average clipper is moisture-deprived, so it won't drop huge amounts of snow. Instead of two or three feet, it'll leave just a few inches on a narrow track that goes by places like Milwaukee or Detroit. ...

"You'll likely see more clippers than usual during La Nina years, like this one. That's when the jet stream often dives south across the Great Lakes. This year, the Lakes were one of only a few spots in the nation where people actually saw a white Christmas, thanks to the Alberta Clippers."

My recall of first hearing that term was from Mark Eubank, a colorful (for Utah) meteorologist. I thought "Albert Clipper" was Mark's exclusive coinage, since he appeared to be the one who named a hot Great Salt Lake desert wind a "hatu," which sounded exotic, like the Chinook winds of the east slope of the Rockies, or the Harmattan winds of the arid northern region of Nigeria, or the Santa Anas from the Mojave -- but turned out to be "Utah" spelled backwards.

Tom Wills, our non-colorful (but my favorite because of his competence in spite of his "pallor") Louisville weathercaster, has been talking about Alberta Clippers frequently of late, and it is colder than blue Billy be damned right now. Last night Stephen Colbert in his Bill Orally guise said, "It's freezing cold right now. See? There's no global warming."

Of course only three days ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change issued an unequivocal report on the existence of the phenomenon of global warming and was just as unequivocal in attributing it to human activity. And Exxon has offered $10,000 to any scientist who will rebut that report. Which goes to show that we still have the best science that money can buy (and religion will allow).

For some reason, it's always been good for my morale to experience a little winter. I got the snow shovel out of the shed a while ago on the advice of Tom et al. that we are to get four to six this evening. So: Alberta, clip us! Clip us!