Archive for October, 2023

THE ANNULAR ECLIPSE OF 2023

October 21, 2023

I wasn’t sure where I was going to be at the annular eclipse until 30 minutes before annularity began. 

And I had just driven about 170 miles.  The sky was mostly clear, finally; the partially eclipsed  Sun in front of me was still too bright to clearly see that it was eclipsed. I saw one group at the side of the road, and I just swung off 50 yards from them.

Eight years before, I didn’t even know there was going to be an annular eclipse here, although I had known about the 2024 total eclipse for probably two decades.  Annular eclipses are central, but here, the Moon is too far away (about 6,000 miles too far.)  If you have had a recent “Supermoon,” a term I don’t particularly like, a full Moon that is close to Earth, the New Moon will then be far from the Earth, and if it covers the Sun, it will do so incompletely. 

The first annular eclipse I ever saw was 4 January 1992.  Before I left for San Diego, I told someone at the astronomy club what I was doing, and he said, “Annular, big deal.  And you will probably be clouded out.” We didn’t care. It was a weekend in San Diego, and we would either see the eclipse or not. We weren’t true eclipse chasers, then, because if we had been, I would have been all over every source of weather information for eclipse day that I could find.

We went to Mt. Cube, to get up high, because we were at the end of the track, so close to the end, that if we were at ground level, we would miss it. The Moon started covering the Sun and annularity occurred as the Sun set through a cloud bank over the ocean. The colors were fabulous, and the picture of this annularity is recognizable from all others. We were with a small group of maybe 10, and unlike now, where people dot the road looking at an eclipse, nobody else was out there viewing.

Thirty minutes later, it was pouring rain.

We saw another annular in 1994 from Bisbee, Arizona, and a third from Costa Rica in clouds, barely visible, in 2001. I did get clouded out (pouring rain) in Iceland in 2003, but we saw the annular in Spain in 2005.  We were on the coast near Javea, and on eclipse day, there was thick fog. We drove inland 10 miles to see the eclipse in sunny skies, with one other group near us and near busy traffic without anybody else’s showing interest.  This particular eclipse was destined to re-occur 18 years and 10 1/3 days later, and given time zones and leap years, that would be 14 October 2023, a third of the world west of Spain, like the US.

In the intervening time, I saw an annular from Kenya, about eight minutes’ duration, in 2010, the same family as the first one in 1992. We saw the repeat of the 1994 eclipse in 2012, only the former was in the early morning and the latter was in late afternoon, both in Arizona. The last we saw from a hotel parking lot in Page. It was a hot afternoon, and eleven of us had access to an air conditioned lobby,  It certainly beat being among several thousand below us about 500 vertical feet and 5 miles distant, from the LA Astronomical Society over Horseshoe Bend of the Colorado River.  We were joined by Sergey, whom I met at the Kenya eclipse, and my wife rescued a pair of Swiss women who accidentally locked themselves out of their room from their balcony.  The eclipse went well, nobody came out from the meeting in the hotel conference room.  After the eclipse, we packed up and drove back to the South Rim that evening, just beating the traffic from Horseshoe Bend, cars parked for a half mile on either side of the road to the overlook.  

Annular eclipse, Page, AZ 20 May 2012

Annular Eclipse, Lake Nakuru National Park, Kenya 15 January 2010. The Moon was further away and the eclipse lasted over 8 minutes.

he annular would begin shortly after 8 and would be annular between 0916 and 0920 in Eugene. 

I start looking at the weather models 16 days out, just to get an idea of what the pattern would look like. All I get then is an idea of rain or no rain, and the weather did not look completely rain free.  About a week out, I use Spot Wx to start getting an idea of cloudiness.  The site is superb with cloud percentages, and one can look easily at many locations. From 10 days out the models go to 3 1/2, then 2, then 1. It became clear the few days prior to the eclipse that we wouldn’t have clear skies.  I started to investigate other portions of the eclipse track and found better conditions east of the Cascade crest.

Two days before, Club hikes to see the eclipse were canceled due to cloudiness predicted. I heard that Eugene would be clouded out.  Maybe, but maybe not, so I posted the following for general information:

“Tomorrow’s annular eclipse has not yet been clouded out. It ain’t over until it is over and you didn’t see it. This will be my 28th central eclipse trip (total + annular), and I’ve been successful 24 times.  Several were successful at the last minute, including a hole that opened up in rain clouds at totality in China in 2009. Unreal. Or the amazing total eclipse in 2010 where we could see the conical shadow from the end of the track in Patagonia, and 10 minutes after totality it snowed. Or Siberia, in 1997, when the cloudiness lifted just in time for first contact.  Or the annular in ’92 in San Diego, where the beautiful eclipsed Sun set in clouds into the Pacific Ocean and an hour later it poured rain….  

“I don’t like to tell people what they should do. I just tell them what I am going to do, and why, and being an old geezer, I’ve been around long enough to have gotten lucky. A lot. I saw this annular series 3 Oct 2005 from Valencia, Spain, where we had to travel inland quickly to escape the fog on the coast. 18 years and 11 days later, it is back, 1/3 of the way west around the world. Why that happens is as beautiful as the sight itself.  

“Fortune favors boldness.

“Anyway, just some thoughts.”

The night before, I was using the HRRR model, which has mile resolution. I had hoped for clear skies over the Cascade passes, only an hour and a quarter from my house, but by early morning, the only clear skies predicted were in Klamath Falls, so I was on the road early. My wife opted to avoid 350 miles of driving and took her chances here.

We were both pleased with what we got. She saw annularity from the house; I saw it in clear skies. 

Annular Eclipse, 14 October 2023, Klamath Falls, Oregon.

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OUTSIDE CONTROL LIMITS

October 2, 2023

That night, on Crooked Lake, 19 years ago, rain that had begun 24 hours earlier continued with the addition of a howling wind, the likes of which I had never heard before. It would start as a low whine and increase to a loud scream. 

We had been tent bound most of the day, and a measuring cup had 3 inches of water in it, so it  had been a good day not to move. The wind, however, scared me. It was a known danger, with tree limbs and whole trees possibly coming down. I had seen such places in the canoe country, once in Gabbro, far to our southeast, where there were downed trees all over the campsite. These trees weren’t dead to begin with. They had been very much alive but unable to bend sufficiently in the wind to keep them from breaking apart, shattering, 20-30 feet above the ground.

I lay awake, waiting for the sound of a branch cracking, which would be my signal to leave the tent. In case I didn’t, I had a hand saw next to me, not that it would help much if a 14 inch trunk landed on me.  I finally fell asleep, and the next day we would have a northwest wind behind us on the long paddle back to Basswood Lake.

That event was a powerful storm, but it was not unusual.  Lately, I have concerns about unknown weather, the new weather. I think many felt global climate change just meant slightly warmer days. It doesn’t work that way.  When a system starts to become less controlled, the first thing that changes is the variability.  Now, the average has also changed, the variability increase obvious.  We are discovering that systems stall and either produce long droughts, floods, or major blizzards, called by climatologist Daniel Swain as “precipitation whiplash.”  I do a decent job of weather predicting in the outdoors and in town, I check the European and American models daily. I ought to be far more comfortable, but the other day, I realized I am not, and that is disturbing.

Two years ago, the models predicted remarkably  high temperatures for the Northwest, so high that they were discounted. But while the temperatures didn’t reach the low 120s, (49-50 C.) except in Canada, they came close enough for three days, far closer to the models than anyone had forecasted. Heat of this nature was so far off the graph of the daily temperatures for the last 100 years that a discreet 3 dots may be seen well above the curve of the other 36,525 temperatures.

Heat is silent, but I am old, and my physiological ability to deal with high temperatures is less. I still work in hot weather, but I drink often, and after a morning’s hard work, I am tired. By the end of the day, I am very tired, and it takes me half the next day to recover. I used to hike Spencer Butte on Wednesday after having worked Tuesday. I don’t anymore.  One day this summer, despite drinking over 3 liters of fluid while working, it took me a full day to recover.

Storms concern me now. I have always had a slight sense of worry mixed with excitement when awakening in the woods to the low rumble of an incoming thunderstorm. I’ve dealt with them. I stay on my pad, inside, and hope a tree nearby doesn’t fall on me. But now there seems to be a difference in these storms. They are more energetic than formerly. They carry more water, and I am not sure our models will capture their strength the way they did with the high temperatures.  Or maybe the models will be correct, but humans reading them will say no, that can’t be right, when it is. Now, I will be asking the questions:  is this a storm type I have dealt with or is this a new type I have never experienced? Or is the categorization something I haven’t yet considered?

New York’s recent flooding had very little warning. The storm was more compact and wetter than expected, and the concern was raised by meteorologists that the large effect, smaller scale events will be much more difficult to forecast, especially for major metropolitan areas, where a few miles one way or the other makes a huge difference.

In the changing climate, we will have to learn new rules and keep learning them, since equilibration is centuries away, barring ways to decarbonize the atmosphere. Storms may form faster than we have seen before, catching seasoned weather watchers off guard. What bothers me is we will encounter changes we can’t even imagine. If temperatures can reach 118 in the PNW, can we go a half year with no rain?  Can we have a dozen wet atmospheric rivers in 3 months like hit  California?  Streams have evolved in the face of past rain events may not be able to deal with new rain events—there may be flooding or dangerous currents that have never been seen before, and these may be significant issues not only in the backcountry but even on the highways, major or minor, that lead to these areas.

Not only may streams not be properly configured, neither may be trees. What happens when so much precipitation falls that the soil gives way, as it already has? Will this make trees unstable, promote root rotting, early death?  We don’t know. What plant can survive flooding rains and months of drought? While they can evolve. but will they if frequency and severity quickly double?  Evolution is slower.

I am leaving the Earth’s stage at the very dawn of these new changes.  I will see them and expect to be significantly affected by some.  But I won’t be here for the main show, which is going to show changes never imagined, be tragic, and expensive beyond belief.

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