Not a One-number Town

Or, not a two-number town or even a three-number town.

You have heard that expression before.

Many times.

And it is the truth.

On given nights, you could almost toss a dart at a dart-board and pick the low temperature for your particular address.

Well, a slight stretching-of-the-truth with that remark but the variation can be substantial. Consider these low temperatures this morning:

* 30 at Anniston Airport but only 43 atop Mt. Cheaha not many old crow miles away

* 29 in Pinson but only 46 at the Downtown Birmingham SkyCam. That is a difference of 17 degrees just over about the north half of Jefferson County!

* 35 at Birmingham Airport, 11 degrees colder than the SkyCam about 4 air miles away.

Big variations happen most often when a “cold snap” is about over, the high pressure area is moving on toward the east and southerly winds are trying to set in. The southerly winds are noticeable first on the ridges while some of the cold air is still “trapped” in the valleys. Takes a little longer for the south wind to scoop the colder air away.

A LONG-AGO TEST OF TEMPERATURE CONTRASTS

It was about 1952 when I was about one-half century younger. I lived at McCalla and I talked two friends to join me in an overnight “research project” to check the great variation. We talked the operator of the forest-fire lookout tower to let us install a max-min thermometer for one night only at the base of the tower on the highest point of Shades Mountain. (Bluff Park).

My friends and I went in to the SW part of the county and set up a min thermometer on the lower part of a fire look-out tower on Rock Mountain. Then we went down the east side of Rock Mountain, set up another thermometer and settled in for the night in our sleeping bags.

The topography was so rough in those days that we left my car three miles away, in a more civilized area, and hiked in and camped just off an old log road. Today, that section of Jefferson County has numerous beautiful homes.

WE GOT SCARED: About 2:30 am, we heard a motor running. Just 100 feet away, an old pickingup truck (excuse my Justin Wilson lingo) was easing its way along the old log road with lights off. In the faint light, we could see something in the back that looked like a couple of drums. I am 92% certain it was some bootleggers going to their moonshine still. We were afraid to fold our sleeping bags and try to get out of there. We laid low. About an hour later, the old truck came back and went away. A sigh of relief. I feel sure that if they has seen us and knew that we could see their license plate, they would have shot us.

Horrors!

Then, I would have never enjoyed a long career in weather.

Nor would I have met my wife, Judy, or Little Miss Molly…

Sorry to get off the subject…so here are the low temperatures that morning (from other reports also)

* 26 in Pinson

* 54 on Shades Mountain at the base of the fire tower

* 31 with frost at our “campsite” at the bottom of Rock Mountain

* 49 at the second level of the stairway on the Rock Mountain fire tower

That is a 28-degree difference between Pinson and Bluff Park. An extreme case of a temperature inversion.

I know this story sounds wacky but we were just young kids and I already had an inborn passion for weather dating back to my second diaper change about an hour after I was born in the midst of the Talladega National Forest in NE Hale County.

Life goes on and one never knows, for sure, what direction. Five years after that little temperature experiment, I was fortunate enough to be accepted into the U.S. Weather Bureau at Birmingham Airport for a long career.

( I plan to use this story eventually in my “wanna-write” book with the title, “Scatterbrains and Scattered Showers.”)

Category: Pre-November 2010 Posts