In the "Little House on the Prairie" series, one of the later books describes the family's move to the Dakota's and the long winter they suffered through.
In The Long Winter, the prairie is hammered by a rapid series of intense blizzards, from October until April - about two per week, according to the book, though that may be some exaggeration.
My kids were shocked when I told them, after we read the book, that it was based on real life incidents, not pure fiction.
Looks like the long winter is back
From accuweather, monday 30th March 2009
Interesting.
It is tempting to note that 1879-1880 was the end of a solar cycle, though sunspot numbers had started to bounce back up by late 1880.
So it is actually a pretty crappy correlation.
We might be getting close to the 1810-1811 dip in sunspot numbers.
Gonna be interesting to see how it goes.
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Our last snow was about a month ago. This winter was strange, then the past few years have been that way.
You'd get about 8 or so inches of snow. Then it'd warm up next day and you'd have a sloppy mess on your hands. Then it would rain, freeze, turn to ice for a day or two, then warm up again, evaporate and sublimate and then be bone dry.
It's raining now as I speak.
I'm not at all surprised. I'm not as far north as the Dakotas, and near sea level to boot. We are not surprised to see snow in April, although it doesn't happen every year. We even had to take an April snow day a couple of years ago--it wasn't so much the amount as the fact that the snow was so wet and heavy that it brought tree limbs crashing onto power lines in a lot of places.
And don't forget eighteen hundred and froze-to-death (aka the Year Without a Summer). Every month of 1816 saw snow and killing frost in New England. The reputation of the Old Farmers Almanac comes from its correct prediction of two July snowstorms that year. In that case the cause was not sunspots but an Indonesian volcano, Tambora, which had exploded the previous year--the largest volcanic eruption ever observed by literate people.
Eric Lund,
Odd you should mention that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hkmqnPrQReU
The Children's Blizzard is a heartwrenching and meterologically interesting account of those years, too.