Decisions, decisions …

by Susan Anderson
Tuesday, May 6, 2008 2:40 PM MDT

You would think that on May 1, it would be time to put the flannel sheets away. If you did that in Casper this year, you would wake up the next day with two feet of snow on the mountain, 4.8 inches in town and be really sorry you went to chilly, light cotton.

I made the right call this year and lollygagged about the summer bedding, so I was smugly lying around in warm flannel watching an inch a minute of snow falling on Friday morning.

It’s very hard to make normal spring decisions in Casper any year, but this one in particular.

I knew parents who were miffed when the kids suddenly had a day off in April to use up an extra snow day that hadn’t been taken during winter, and with a little bit of mild vengeful thinking were hoping that an April Fool snowstorm would force an unplanned snow day later in April or May.

It’s not nice to think you know when Mother Nature is finished with snowstorms for the year.

It looked like that wish might come true on May 2, but Casper people and the school buses proved hardy enough to make it to school, on a day that anybody south of Kansas would have viewed as a major reason to close everything.

How windy was it, anyway?

This May storm was nothing compared to the wind in January.

I heard enough people with 60-plus years in Casper under their belts say it was the windiest, most miserable winter ever that I decided to do some research.

Checking the National Weather Service Climate Survey for January tells me that it was even worse than I remember.

Beginning with the temperature, which isn’t nearly as bad as wind, I discovered that in January, there were 15 days when the temperature was below average for Casper in that month.

For one nine-day stretch, it was colder than normal every day-- as much as 18 degrees.

But, of course, we don’t care about the temperature -- it’s the wind. When looking at the wind speeds, consider this cheery sentence from several Web sites about Casper: “Casper averages 275 days of sunshine every year and experiences an average wind speed of 12.9 miles per hour.”

By the way, Wyoming is in fact ranked first in the U.S. for its average wind speed.

On Jan. 5, there was a peak gust of 78 mph. But if you had the feeling that the wind never, ever really died down, you are absolutely, unfortunately right.

The least windy day in January had a peak wind speed of 22 mph. There were long stretches where the peak wind speeds went like this: 44 mph, 63 mph, 78 mph.

For one gruesome week, the peak speeds were 49 mph, 45 mph, 44 mph, 38 mph, 44 mph, 58 mph.

Doesn’t that make you crazy just reading it?

“Well below zero”

In researching Wyoming weather history, I read that blizzard conditions “consist of high winds in excess of 35 mph, low temperatures below 20 degrees Fahrenheit, blowing snow with a visibility of less than one-quarter mile, and lasting for a minimum of three hours.”

In the 1980s, there were at least nine statewide blizzards in Wyoming, and in the 1990s there were at least 25.

And to really put our May weather in perspective, I dug up a weather statement from Jan. 31 of this year in central Wyoming.

“The area is seeing an average wind speed of 50 miles per hour with frequent gusts in excess of 70 miles per hour. White-out conditions prevail with icy roadways and wind chill factors well below zero.”

Doesn’t today look great?

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