Snow brings chaos to Japan

Luc Citrinot in Travel Daily News: Sudden snow in Eastern Japan halted public transport and caused dozens of road accidents last Monday with Japan’s national television network NHK reporting about 267 being injured in road accidents following heavy snow.

Snow delayed train services and disrupted also flights last Monday as Tokyo was blanketed by the first snowfall of the season. The Meteorological Agency issued a gale and snow advisory for central Tokyo, with 7 cm of snow already fallen in the capital, said Kenji Okada, a forecaster for the agency. The snow came 11 days later than the average first fall and six days earlier than last year, according to Okada.

Power was cut to 6,200 households in Tokyo and the surrounding area in the evening. Minor delays were expected for bullet train services to and from the Japanese capital. Central Japan Railway Co. (JR Tokai) said.  Some train lines in Metropolitan Tokyo area were also temporarily halted.

...Tokyo's Narita International Airport said 3,400 travelers spent the night in the terminal after 71 flights were cancelled. Operations returned to normal Tuesday except for a few delays, according to Associated Press news agency...

A snowy street in Tokyo, shot by Masahiro Hayata, Wikimedia Commons via Flickr, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic license

Winter storm brings devastation to Syria and neighbors

Erika Solomon and Oliver Holmes in Reuters: The worst winter storm in two decades has hit the eastern Mediterranean this week, bringing destruction and death to Syria and its neighbors who are already dealing with a refugee crisis from the country's civil war.

Opposition activists in Syria, where war has forced hundreds of thousands of people from their homes and cut off access to food, fuel and power for cities and towns, say dozens of people have died there in four days of relentless extreme weather.

At least 17 people have also died due to the storm in Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Israel and the Palestinian territories. Schools in some areas have been shut for days, refugee camps flooded and villages isolated by closed roads. Meteorological agencies in Israel and Lebanon both called it the worst storm in 20 years.

Snowfall in the Syrian capital Damascus and the northern city of Aleppo did not halt the fighting between rebels and forces loyal to President Bashar al-Assad, which has killed more than 60,000 people in the past 21 months....

Winter in the village of Deirmama, Masyaf, Hama Governorate, Syria. The old mosque is covered with snow. A 2007 shot by Ammagaro., Wikimedia Commons, under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported

Travel chaos as deadly storm hits northeast US

The Times of India: The US northeast was battered by heavy snow and strong winds on Thursday as a mighty storm carved a violent arc across several states, killing more than a dozen people and snarling holiday travel.

More than 3,000 flights have been cancelled since Christmas Day including 746 on Thursday, as the storm wreaked havoc from the Gulf of Mexico to the Great Lakes before heading northeast, according to tracker FlightAware.

In New York City, high winds caused major air traffic delays: 186 flights were cancelled outright at the three major airports -- Kennedy, LaGuardia and Newark. "Winter weather has arrived for many parts of the state, so as a precaution we have opened the emergency operation center to coordinate response efforts using all state and local resources," New York governor Andrew Cuomo said.

New York mayor Michael Bloomberg used residents still without power two months after deadly superstorm Sandy slammed into the city in October to seek refuge in emergency shelters. Although the storm was winding down late Thursday, a warning for heavy snow remained in effect overnight in New Hampshire and western Maine, the National Weather Service said.

The storm was departing the region, the government forecasters said, "but not before dumping another six to eight inches (15 to 20 centimeters) of snow over portions of Maine."...

Shot by Jeff the quiet, public domain

US drought has tight hold, snow not seen as big help

Carey Gillam in Reuters: A snow storm moving through the Plains states into the U.S. Midwest brought much-needed moisture to drought-hit states, but drought has such a tight grip on the central U.S. that more moisture will be needed, according to weather experts.

"The snow is good, but in most instances it was less than one inch of liquid and if the soils are frozen, there will be little infiltration," said Brian Fuchs, climatologist with the National Drought Mitigation Center at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. "Welcomed, yes. A big changer to the overall drought, not really," Fuchs said.

A report issued Thursday by a consortium of federal and state climatology experts said that as of December 18, large swaths of the nation's midsection remained blanketed in extreme and exceptional levels of drought, the worst levels on the measurement scale.

Before the snow storm hit late Wednesday, nearly 27 percent of the High Plains, was considered in the very worst level of drought, exceptional drought. Indeed, "severe," and "extreme" levels of drought also crept higher over the last week, according to the Drought Monitor report.

Severe drought was spread over 86.20 percent of the High Plains, up from 86.12 percent the week before, while extreme drought area was pegged at 59.98 percent of the region, up from 58.39 percent. Exceptional drought was pegged at 26.99 percent, up from 26.91 percent....

Cows in a 2007 snowstorm in Oberlin, Kansas, shot by FEMA

Russia, Ukraine hit with massive snowfall

Terra Daily via AFP: Russia and Ukraine on Tuesday battled through heavy snowfall which created record traffic jams in Moscow and cut power in some 300 Ukrainian towns. Colossal amounts of snow fell overnight, making the morning commute into the Russian capital a nightmare, with stop-and-go traffic on most major streets to the center.

"Today Moscow was one step away from complete transportation paralysis," a presenter said on Channel One's afternoon news. A government plane with several ministers was delayed by the weather flying out of Moscow due to particularly heavy snowfall in Vnukovo airport, Russian agencies reported.

The airport said on its website that it was forced to close down its landing strip for fifteen minutes every hour in order to clean it and treat it with anti-freezing agents.

The emergency ministry in Tver region northwest of Moscow -- where thousands of trucks were stuck in a 190 kilometre-long jam over the weekend -- warned that snowfall is once again slowing down transport.

"There is increased risk of traffic jams and accidents due to snowfall," the ministry said on its website, warning of a decreased speed limit on the highway M10 that links Moscow and St. Petersburg....

First snow on a Ukrainian railway bridge in 2010, shot by Maksim Nakonechny, public domain

Snow

Jon and I survived the 2 day trip to our northern Quebec field site near Schefferville.
This morning we left the McGill sub-arctic field station in almost all the clothes we brought, and my feet were still cold by 9:30am.




What can we say, there was a lot of snow.  The upside is that there are no bugs.