It’s Calgary

Uncategorized 39 Comments

And it must be June.

#abstorm — The folks running the simulation are just pushing buttons for fun now*.

39 Replies to “It’s Calgary”

  2. Day 2 in Calgary. We’re in deep SW and squeaked up the middle tonight. T-storms right and left. Rain at 11 AM was pretty intense, pretty good lightning, too. Yesterday was just a lot cracks and bangs, a bunch of rain and over in 30 minutes.Tonight, we again escaped the worst, just a light rain. No hail, both passes. Color me surprised.

  3. NW here. Lightning in 3 spats tonight. Hail was less than pea sized. We’re getting off lightly this time.

    When we first moved here 10 years ago we had softball sized hail 3 months after moving in. Good thing that climate change has taken that away, never to return (/sarc).

    1. Same neck of the woods here. Heavy rain at times but no hail. I was watching Strathmore doppler and saw the bright purple patch (up to 200mm/hr) around 7pm by YYC airport/QE2 hwy. Normally it’s us getting smacked like that.

    2. I was living in Canyon Meadows in the mid 90’s, the Year of The Hail. Drove a Dodge p/u at the time, parked outside. Doing steak on the Hibachi in the fireplace, light got dark and then the kids stated throwing their ball against the wall…I thought. Thump….thump….thump, so I went to look. Big Hail, started slow, one here, one over there, for about a minute. Then the skies opened. The 7-Eleven guy saved some in the freezer, some up to 3 inches. Truck lost a mirror, dimpled everywhere save the tailgate. About $3500 in damage. Jap scrap was perforated. Windshield escaped! Truck was only 6 months old.

      1. Ouch. We got a replacement roof and all 4 sides of the house for new siding because of hail damage. The insurance is a little more expensive than I was used to, but now I know why.

        1. We just did our roof 3 years ago, after 20 odd years of the original, interlocking. The south end hip roof needed it, but the rest was pretty good. It’s a bungalow. I just got that itchy feeling between the shoulder blades when walking the peak for an inspection. We’ve had a few good whackings up there with hail over the years. Glad I did because timing is everything. The day after the roofers finished up here comes de hail! Doubled up the felt and redid the flashing, too. Siding, amazingly hasn’t a dint in it. House is N-S oriented and like today’s storm front our weather comes either S to N or N to S, small foot print. Western stuff is protected by the house next door.

  4. That might explain why it’s been hot and sticky here in Edmonton. I’ve noticed some distant lightning flashes in the last few minutes, so we might be in store for a window-rattler in the next few hours.

    It just started raining, so I expect that we’ll be deluged with felines and canines.

    3. Re “deluged with felines and canines.”

      An expression down here for an exceptional such event is “raining piss and pick handles”

      1. I live about 10 km away from West Edmonton Mall and can see it from my balcony. Similarly, I’m roughly 5 km south of the U of A.

        My rule of thumb is that if I can’t see either place, visibility’s poor.

        1. In Twin Brooks (south Edmonton) we saw a little rain and I heard one crack of thunder. So, in other words, nothing to see over here. Typical prairie weather. Wasn’t it just last year that precious, fragile young CBC news gatherers were throwing story after story at us about a generational drought and forest fire infernos. Thank god the carbon tax solved all that.

  5. I was caught in the dead centre of this storm at Deerfoot and Harvest Hills for an intense half hour.

    I have a lovely photo of the Deerfoot moon scape after being burried in Golf ball sized hail if Kate so wants it.

    1. Did you get a chance to stand outside and watch the show moving away? It sure puts “mankind controls the weather by CO2 emissions” in perspective.

      Hopefully you and yours are safe? Our dog and kids were terrified, but calmed down after it passed.

      1. Thanks, all is well. Stayed indoors. I had fertilized my flowers yesterday just in time. They should be giants after all this rain. No hail here, was worried that the plants would be wrecked. A few years ago the broad leaf hostas looked like a slasher had attacked them — they were reduced to ribbons!

      1. Cool! I saw a lightning show like that once in Montreal, waaaay back in the early 70’s. No rain where we were. Had to shut down loading our tanker for a few hours, down in refinery land. Lightning jumped from cloud to cloud like in your video for about an hour or so. No ground strikes.

  8. Calgary, this is gods punishment for letting BLM & Antifa run amok in your streets a few days ago!

  9. Good thing we are not a primitive, uneducated, uncivilized society, we might think things were conspiring against us.

    1. Witchcraft I tell you! Witchcraft!
      No, wait. This is 2020 — Global Warming I tell you! Global Warming!

  10. Rescued a couple of my “daughters” from a similar $%!# show down on Memorial drive last night. It’s Calgary and it’s June. Meh.
    More rain on the way. Next come the flies — but still nothing as compares to northern Quebec.

  11. We experienced a real gully-washer last night here in Airdrie. Rain and hail for about 6 hours and then just rain for another 4.

  13. Can’t complain from here, the west windows are crystal clear without lifting a finger.

    1. Same here. All the winter grime washed off the windows with some weak HCO3. Just waiting for a NE source to do the front ones.

      1. Yeah, the NE storm winds come rarely, thinking the climate change is too damn slow.

        1. T-storm activity is fascinating in Alberta, especially along the Foothills. I used to drill just off Hwy # 2 up around Didsbury Carstairs area (among others), so we had a ringside seat to all the summer T-storm activity. Great panorama views, lounging on the mud tanks or off the “floor”. Watch them build up over the Front Ranges, then march east or strangely enough zigzag north to Grande Prairie. The northeast ones just got bigger and bigger as they headed off to Saskatchewan. Evenings were pink sunsets off the tops a couple of hundred miles away, while we were already with lights on and swatting bugs.

          1. Similarly, I spent 3 summers at the petrochemical facility in Taylor, B. C. back when it consisted of an oil refinery, a tank farm, and a gas plant.

            It was located close to the Peace River and a short distance from the mouth of the Pine. Each river had its own weather system and we got some wild and woolly storms when those two merged.

            The refinery had 3 distillation columns about 70 m high. It wasn’t unusual for them to receive lightning strikes when there was a thunderstorm. During my second summer, I worked at the top of one of them and I saw some of the damage done to the insulation, which, as I recall was at least 10 cm thick.

            It was nearly burned through in places.

          2. I rarely stopped in Taylor, headed to points north or south. The air quality was enough to gag on. I guess you get used to it. I couldn’t smell diesel on jobs up in NE BC, it permeated the rig air. Diesel was the drilling fluid of choice as water based muds tended to swell up from the natural bentonite in the shale formations and screw up your drilling parameters. Only when opening my kit bags for a laundry load back home would it come at you with a vengeance. Taylor had that “je ne sais quois” stink to it I rarely experienced elsewhere in my travels about NE BC. The holes I drilled usually ended up supplying a lot of the Stink of Taylor. I actually drilled one overlooking the town, from the bluffs of the Peace River Valley. We could stroll 50 yards to the edge overlooking the river valley and look right into downtown.
            Arrrgh Billy, the stink of diesel, is the smell of money. Multi million dollar wells. Paid for the house I live in now. The gas fires your furnace and hot water tanks.

          3. While I was growing up in Fort St. John, we sometimes smelled Taylor if the wind blew in the right direction.

            Keep in mind that the gas that came into the plant was often sour. It was wicked stuff as I was often required to wear an air mask as a precaution whenever we were working inside a building.

            Of course, the gas was “sweetened” before it was sent down the line. That’s an interesting process in itself.

          4. There’s a market for all that sulfur taken out of the gas. When I first came out to Alberta, you’d see the “blocks” of solidified sulfur piled outside gas plants from the processing. Now you don’t, as the sulfur ends up as soil acidiifier where a lot of fertilizer is used….that white stuff around sloughs you see out on the prairies. A lot of it is shipped overseas from North Vancouver docks for the same purpose. Byproducts of gas processing end up as nitrogen fertilizers for agriculture, among other things.
            See, all that oil and gas drilling has benefits in ways most folks are ignorant of. Let’s ban it. And let’s ban pipelines for shipping it safely and economically while we’re at it. Your grocery bills will go up without it.

  14. “The folks running the simulation are just pushing buttons for fun now*.”

    Anyone who’s played SimCity always find themselves ending successful games by generating natural disasters over and over.

Proudly powered by WordPress & Skyrocket Themes

MENU

Navigation