Weather Patterns

Friday afternoon I sadly said goodbye to Katie, Henry and New York City. The weather was mild, the sun shone through a soft haze over Jamaica Bay, and now I am in L.A. with anticipation for tonight’s overnight flight to New Zealand and the very extreme Antarctic weather to follow. Never have my emotions gotton so mixed up with weather patterns in my imagination.

I wanted to follow up on one of my favorite videos I sent around, Antarctica Condition 1 Weather by fellow NSF artist grantee Anthony Powell (“Antz”) and his wife Christine. He shot it last year working as a winter-over contractor, one of about 200 people who operate McMurdo Station through the dark months of the polar night, from mid-February to late August. His camera follows Christine down the hall of a McMurdo dorm and into a vestibule with snow on the carpeted floor, ice on the walls, and a scrolling sign that looks like a cheap prop from Aliens threateningly blinking “CONDITION 1” in red LEDs. Even in the small frame of the video the room feels fa-REEZ-ing. I’m not going to spoil it for you, but they open the door—and please watch this with the sound on because their reactions are priceless!

Anyways, will it be like this when I am there? Probably not but you never know. The weather conditions around McMurdo are volatile pretty much all year long, but during the transitions to and from polar night—when one long day becomes one long night and vice versa—the wind does tend to blow more. When the sun rises and sets in Antarctica the winds can kick up, and the strongest winds blow in August when the sun is rising. This is when Antz shot the video. The sun only rises and sets for a couple months, twice a year in Antarctica. The rest of the time it is high in the sky for four months, or well below the horizon the other four months. Here are two important charts: Temperature/wind speed and sunset/sunrise times. If they look confusing in meters/second and degrees Celsius I feel you, but at least you can see the dramatic shifts that take place in Antarctica’s seasons.