By Jenny Neyman
Photos by Jenny Neyman, Redoubt Reporter. High-tech weather instruments and an old-fashioned barometer are attached to a fence in Jerry Olmes’ backyard in Soldotna.
Redoubt Reporter
To someone whose interest in the weather is limited to glancing out a window before settling on a shoe choice in the morning, Jerry Olmes’ level of fascination may be about as foreign as the details he keeps daily records of — heat index, solar radiation, evapotranspiration rate.
Temperature, precipitation, wind speed — that’s all well and good, but that’s not what led Olmes to get his own weather station setup at his house. That’s not what made him go from reading Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath” to studying the possible causes and effects of Dust Bowl storms during the Great Depression for his master’s thesis. That’s not what has him starting every day checking anemometer readings and measuring his own rain gauge, and ending each day logging summaries of the wind speeds, rain rates and solar radiation totals in between.
“I’ve done this in the various places I’ve lived as a hobby. I’ve always had an interest in it, and so I’ve made just personal, for-fun observations, just to see how things go from year to year,” Olmes said.
The extent of what casual weather observers are concerned with barely scratches the surface of Olmes’ hobby. Temperature, cloud cover, whether it might rain tomorrow — all that is merely the most noticeable picture created from the puzzle pieces of the forces of nature at work. It’s the end result of the interplay of wind sweeping in off the ocean, of moisture-laden clouds being wrung out over mountains, of geography exerting its inexorable influence over air patterns, and the monkey wrenches that El Ninos or sun-spot activity can occasionally throw in.
Those facets are what elicit an “oh, my gosh” from the Soldotna retiree — spoken with a cadence, tonality and reverence similar to the last three notes in the “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” tune — and what’s kept him fascinated by the sky and all its predictability, variety and occasional violence since he was a child.
“When I was a small boy, my father and I used to go out and look at thunderstorms. We’d go out and drive and watch them and stuff like that, and I’ve always been interested. It’s just been a hobby ever since,” Olmes said.
He studied meteorology in college, though he got a degree in geography, and got a master’s degree in physical geography with an emphasis on climatology from the University of Nebraska Omaha.
Meteorology has never been a profession for Olmes. He had a 30-year career of civilian jobs in the Coast Guard, doing desk-bound administrative work rather than sea duty. But it’s always been an interest. Ask him about the places he’s lived, and you’re likely to get the highlights of storms and weather patterns, rather than descriptions of favorite restaurants or local sports teams.
“I remember living in Cincinnati, we had that tornado outbreak April 3, 1974. Worst tornado outbreak on a single day in recent history. I mean it covered something like 19 states and even up into the southern part of Canada,” Olmes said. “I saw some of those clouds, and I mean to tell you, it was frightful. Those tornadoes would form out of relatively clear skies, and all of a sudden you would see those clouds start moving and you’d see little clouds form under it and get sucked up into it. Just furious nature.”
Olmes and his wife, Jo, lived in Juneau from 1983 to 1987. That’s when he started measuring and recording weather observations, in 1984. He was particularly interested in the variation of topography in Alaska and how it affected the weather.
“In Juneau, downtown at the base of the mountains would get 90 inches of rain a year, and at the airport it was something like 58 or 60 inches, just eight miles out the road,” he said.
They moved to the San Francisco Bay area, which was fairly predictable weatherwise, yet interesting in the microclimates mere miles of each other.
Jerry Olmes logs on to the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network site to check his inputted daily weather observations from Soldotna. He’s the only CoCoRaHS participant on the Kenai Peninsula.
“In Alameda, 98 percent of the time between April and October the only clouds you’ll have are your morning stratus that form being next to the ocean. They burn off about midmorning and that would be the pattern for weeks,” he said. “But occasionally they’ll get winds that come out of the east and nature’s air conditioning shuts down. You don’t get the wind blowing in off the ocean and it can get downright hot, I mean like 94 degrees in the city of San Francisco itself, and everybody just talks about there’s not a breath of air.”
Inland — San Jose, for example — is just enough removed from the typical westerly ocean breeze to really heat up. Warm summer air rises, and when it does, air needs to come in to replace it, creating a moist, cool wind whipping through the bay area to replace rising warm air inland.
“This is why, I think Mark Twain said, ‘The coldest winter I ever spent was a summer in San Francisco.’ Those winds, I mean 25, 30 miles per hour, and if it’s in the low 50s, you can imagine with the wind chill, it feels like 30,” Olmes said. “And these tourists don’t really realize this and are standing out there at Fishermen’s Wharf or the Golden Gate or something and have on a little sweater or T-shirt and they are saying, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ But, yet, you go to the east bay, like Walnut Creek, and it will be 85, 90 degrees.”
After retirement, Jo wanted to move back to Alaska. She would have been happy returning to Juneau, but Olmes was reluctant. The rain was fun to track, but not so fun to live in. Jo’s youngest daughter and family live in Palmer. Her husband is an Alaska State Trooper who was stationed in Soldotna until 2002, and they seemed to like the area well enough. In 2004, the Olmeses moved up and bought a place in the Mountain Rose Estates community in Soldotna. He set up weather equipment on the lattice fence rimming their back patio.
“Soldotna, we really have very benign weather, even as opposed to Kenai, or some other places,” Olmes said. “You look at some places like Palmer, those winds that blow down through the Matanuska Valley — oh, my gosh. I mean, when it’s cold and you get those winds that blow from a high to a low and you’re in an exposed location, it can really be ferocious.”
Olmes is a member of the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail and Snow Network, a nationwide organization of volunteer weather watchers who track data and enter it into an online database daily. Measurement equipment and involvement can be fairly low-tech and low-key, but Olmes’ setup is more elaborate. He’s got an anemometer to measure wind speed, a thermometer, barometer, a measurement of solar radiation and an automatic precipitation gauge that records the exact start and stop times of precipitation, as well as overall amounts and the rate at which it fell.
Olmes uses a globe to explain weather patterns affecting the Kenai Peninsula. He’s been fascinated with meteorology since he was a kid.
Tacked to the bottom of the high-tech assembly is a decidedly low-tech glass beaker with blue liquid and a slender glass spout. The liquid climbs up the narrow spout in response to barometric pressure. A gift from his daughter, Olmes explained, touching the glass while a light breeze rippled through his close-cut white hair and neatly trimmed beard.
He’s also got a manual precipitation gauge that he relies on for specific rain and snowfall amounts. The electronics are good at some things, but he likes to do his own measurements, just to be sure.
“When I do the rain gauge and go out and melt the snow I find almost invariably that I get a higher amount. The electronic equipment, even though it’s good, I think it’s not really as sensitive and gives you generally lower readings,” Olmes said.
Information from his gauges is transmitted to a remote display at his computer area in a cubby off the kitchen. His desk is sandwiched between bookcases also holding a globe, decorative clocks and diplomas. The walls are decorated with a calendar showing weather events and a snowscape painting under a stormy sky. The desk holds a bulky computer, a framed narrative about the wisdom of retirement and a wooden cup with three small American flags poking out of it.
Every morning before 9 a.m., Olmes logs onto the CoCoRaHS site and inputs his observations. Some are straight facts and figures — rain rate, wind speed, snow depth, etc. There’s also a field to type in a brief description, where Olmes sometimes gets a little more expressive, such as “cloudy skies slowly melded into partly cloudy skies.”
“Observations, probably most people don’t get into that very much. I do. I like to put in the values, and I just try to make a few comments about it. Kind of a little narrative of what’s going on,” he said.
Every night before bed he inputs his data into an Excel spreadsheet, which he prints off and archives in the garage. He also sends out monthly weather summaries to anyone wanting to get on his e-mail list. He’s the only CoCoRaHS participant on the Kenai Peninsula, and is a cooperative weather observer for the National Weather Service in Anchorage, providing them information on multi-inch snowfalls and other noteworthy tidbits.
In the study of weather, the importance of time becomes an inescapable reality. There is the occasional singular event that’s noteworthy all by itself — like the central peninsula’s snowfall Dec. 1, 2009, that was hovering on the verge of being rain.
“This thing was cement. It was half rain. Oh, it was hideous to shovel. One point three-two inches. Point nine-two was snow content. Point nine-three was rain, and it was very heavy, miserable stuff,” Olmes said.
Jerry Olmes explains his weather instruments on his back patio in Soldotna. The box above his head has a switch that, when engaged, heats a precipitation collector to melt snow in order to take a reading of the liquid. He also uses a manual rain gauge.
Far more often, what’s noteworthy forms slowly, like a sheen of ice crystallizing atop a deep lake. Long-term records of observations are needed to show trends and averages, in order to provide a backdrop for irregularities to stand out against.
Now that Olmes has been recording weather observations in Soldotna since October 2004, things are really starting to get interesting.
“We’ve been here long enough now to start to see an estimate of what the averages are. After five years it does start to show what you might expect and how much of a departure things are,” Olmes said.
So what has he noticed?
“I can say quite firmly that this winter is fairly warm,” he said. “We’ve had 23 inches of snow, and I would think by this time of year we should have had twice that much, easily. We’re way behind. I wish I could say the same for Philadelphia and Washington, D.C. They’re really getting the lion’s share of it.”
The area’s average winter snowfall, since his record keeping, is about 69 inches, although this winter may bring the average down as low as 60 inches. Or maybe not. It is only February yet.
“No two winters are alike. The first winter we were here there was quite a bit of snow, close to 80 inches. This year, of course, we still have February, and March coming up. We could make up for it. One of the winter months, I think in ’06-’07, we had like 28 inches in one month,” Olmes said.
That same winter, of 2006-07, was brutally cold, Olmes said, accessing a data spreadsheet on his computer.
“There were 60 nights in the course of the entire winter where the temperature got down below zero, and I believe there was one stretch in there that was 90 hours where the temperature stayed below zero consistently, for almost four days,” he said.
That doesn’t beat last winter.
“If we take a look at what happened in January of ’09, it was bitterly cold for the first third of the month. When temperatures finally exceeded zero on the 10th, we’d experienced 327 consecutive hours of subzero temperatures, including 162 consecutive hours where the temperature was below 10 degrees F,” Olmes said.
The December 2008 to January 2009 cold snap is a record, by his reckoning, including the coldest temperature he’s ever recorded in Soldotna — minus 29.04 degrees on Jan. 27, 2009. As near as he can figure, it’s the longest period of subzero temperatures in Soldotna since 1947.
“I won’t say it was the coldest temperature. There are people that’ll say it got down to 47 below in 19-whatever. Granted, it’s been colder, but it didn’t stay subzero that long for that length of time,” Olmes said. “There’s a difference between like 40 below and 20 below, but then if it’s 20 below for a week as opposed to 40 below for two days. This was quite an exclamation point, this cold pattern.”
Olmes’ fun doesn’t stop in the winter. This time of year it’s interesting to note the swing in the amount of solar radiation, as days lengthen their stride back toward summer.
“Now we’ve got a high (solar radiation reading) of 197. In June and July you see values here close to 1,000. In late December, on a cloudy day, I’ve seen a high value of only 7,” he said.
Wind speed can be interesting to note, too. The highest he’s ever seen in Soldotna was a gust of 28 miles per hour, and a recent windstorm registered a gust of 23 mph — not bad for usually calm Soldotna.
Or there’s the rain rate to keep track of. Even if there isn’t much precipitation, sometimes what there is comes down in buckets.
“During a cloudburst that we had one year, I think I saw something like in the neighborhood of 8 to 9 inches an hour. It was phenomenal,” Olmes said. “These numbers just jumped and it was like, ‘Oh, my gosh.’ I mean, you don’t see that very often here.”
And if that doesn’t do it, there’s always the wind chill temperature, or the solar energy value, or evapotranspiration rate … .
“This stuff is really interesting,” Olmes said. “You can really get involved in it. You can almost get lost in it.”
Kenai-Soldotna observations, Feb. 15-21
The weather this past week has been exceptionally mild. Averages compared with Feb. 15-21 since 2005 are:
Hi Lo Avg.
2010 42.7 32.6 37.6
2009 35.1 22.2 28.7
2008 34.9 19.2 27.0
2007 28.0 4.6 16.3
2006 38.0 26.4 32.2
2005 38.4 22.0 30.2
The 37.6° F average exceeds the average of 26.9° F for Feb. 15-21 from 2005-2009 by 10.7° F.
Information submitted by Jerry Olmes, of Soldotna. Look for Olmes’ weather reports every week in the Redoubt Reporter.
