Snow, finally: Well, look what the wind blew in
Tehachapi residents awoke on Monday morning to find the landscape transformed by snow. It wasn’t a total surprise, though, since the storm had been forecast and in the windy night you could hear the small icy snow pellets tapping the windows like a thrown pinch of sand.
Any kind of precipitation is welcome news for the Tehachapi Mountains, and California as whole, since the state has been experiencing the perennial drought that never seems to venture far away before returning.
We’ve had less than two inches of precipitation this winter. The weather year technically begins on July 1 of one year and extends to June 30 of the following year, but most of those months yield little or no moisture. In the mountains of Southern California, most rain or snow falls in December, January and February.
Occasionally we get some welcome early storms in November or even October, and in a favorable year we’ll still get storms in March, April and rarely May. But the most reliable (not that Tehachapi weather is known for reliability) wet months are the last month of one year and the first two of the next year.
Our Jan. 25 snowstorm literally blew in from the west, on winds that reached 35 miles per hour. The result was snow that stuck to upright surfaces, as well as drifts that formed around structures in the wind’s path. The swirling snow made berms on the upwind side, and tapering eddies of snow downwind of trees and other objects.
Blustery conditions also formed unusual icicles. The wind has an interesting effect on icicles: it makes them blunt and rounded. Under normal conditions, trickling drips of melting snow will run down a roof and as they pause at the eave, they are refrozen into a tapering candle or pointed carrot of ice.
When it is very windy, however, these temporary water droplets either get turned back into ice or the wind whips them off the end of the icicle, which ends up being rounded off instead of tapering to a point.
I got out before the sun was fully up and took these photos around our old farm. It’s always interesting to me to see what wintry visuals the snow has produced, since each storm is a unique combination of snow type, quantity, wind conditions, temperature, etc.
More snow is predicted later in the week. I hope it arrives and brings us some more moisture, while increasing the vital snowpack in California’s mountains.
Have a good week.