Had the first ibutton malfunction so far. I was reading one today and found that the last recorded observation was from 13 November, though the device was not full and the mission was still active. Tracked it down to a non-functioning clock. This was one of the new ones I received as replacements for those I gave to be used on a fish and game project – hopefully it’s not indicative of what I an expect from others in that batch.

There appeared to be American Wigeons on Swan Lake, though I didn’t get a great look during a quick drive by. The lake was probably 75% iced over, but had plenty of open water down at the lower end.

Spent a good chunk of my non-resting time getting fungus photos into the wiki. Up to 68 fungus species marked as in the wiki with a pretty good bunch still left to take care of. I expect to be over 100 species by the time I get through current photos.

About a foot of snow covers the long muskeg below the Middle Sister.

I had heard this year was going to be an El Nino year, which seems to correspond to relatively mild winters in Sitka, so it was interesting to see winter season getting started relatively early this year, with snow beginning to fall last week. In fact, there is an El Nino developing in equatorial Pacific Ocean, but apparently in the Pacific Northwest, at least, El Nino impacts tend to be strongest later in winter.

I had ibuttons I wanted to place for a project on temperature variation I’m working on, so I took a couple of hours to hike up Indian River. There was not too much snow in the woods, but in the openings it was at least a foot deep. Temperatures are supposed to rise into the 40s this week, so the snow may not last long, however.

It was pretty quiet overall, but I did hear some Ravens and Golden-crowned Kinglets. I also saw a couple of Brown Creepers and a Varied Thrush. Lots of deer tracks, but I did not see any deer.

Peak 2890 is barely visible through the low clouds above the West Fork of Indian River Valley.

One placement was in the valley bottom, and the other two at the upper edge of the clearcut on the north side of the valley (a south facing slope about 300-400 feet above the valley bottom). One was placed in the clear cut, the other at the edge of the old growth. There was very little difference between the clear cut and old growth placements, so I only included one of them in the following observations. It would be nice to place one on the north facing slopes on the south side of the valley, but access is more difficult, and that’s not happened yet.

In the plot shown (click for a larger version), the two lines are the temperature records from the ibuttons. The light gray vertical stripes indicate darkness, and the boxes are based on the official daily highs and lows (based on the weather station at the airport), with shading determined by the reported cloud cover (white is clear skies, dark gray is overcast).

Based on personal observations, I expected temperatures at Starrigavan to be colder than those at the airport, and this was fairly consistently the case, especially for the valley bottom. It was interesting to see that on many days, the slope temperatures were actually not too far off the airport temperatures, and tended to be less variable.

One of the most striking things about the plot is just how much colder the valley bottom gets compared to the slope, especially during clear weather. I have read about katabatic winds and the pooling of cold air in valley bottoms, but it’s still interesting to see how strong the effect can be. It might be intersting to have several placements along the slope to determine how thick a layer of cold air tends to develop and how sharp the transition is between it and the warmer air above.

It’s not unexpected that daily lows tend to occur just before dawn, with highs in shortly before sunset. However I found it interesting that this was not always the case. In particular, the highest temperature recorded in the period occurred after sunset and was presumably associated with a warm front moving in. The correspondence between daily temperature variation (the difference between the low and the high for a day) and cloud cover is not as strong as I might have guessed, but it seems like this may be due to the use of a single value for the daily cloud cover. It is often the case that cloud cover varies significantly through the day.

All in all, I am happy with the results for far. I’m looking forward to getting data from more locations to fill in some information about temperatures around town.