By Toma Lynn Smith
Louisville’s weather is a schizophrenic phenomenon. “It’s not anything alarming, it’s just kind of amazing,” said Tim Dowling, University of Louisville Associate Professor of Physics and Astronomy.
“We’ve had Hurricane Ike, the winter storm and the windstorm last week,” said Dowling. “This is pretty remarkable to have a major metropolitan area like Louisville get hit by a storm that causes a major power outage, three times in a span of [a few] months.”
“It was naturally occurring climatological phenomenon that really impact the day to day events of our lives,” said Keith Mountain, Chair and Associate Professor, of Department of Geography and Geosciences at U of L. “It finally impacts people and we forget how vulnerable we are.”
Mountain said factors such as population density, how goods and services are delivered to stores, and how power is delivered to the community is what causes people to be alarmed by the weather.
“There are ways to identify what we call ranges or extremes of weather,” said Mountain. “We would certainly look at the unusual windstorm, maybe the high ice event we recently had. “Those were extreme events.”
Altough Dowling believes the chaotic weather is over for now, even though the extremes experienced are a natural occurrence, it is not a new trend, “it’s basically a throw of the dice,” he said.
“The basic cause of that is that the equator’s hot and the poles are cold,” said Dowling. “This is a time of year, were it starts to switch over from kind of a stable winter pattern to the unstable spring pattern. The heat starts to move from the equator to the pole at this time of the year. It’s a little early actually this year; it’s just the way it’s coming out.”
“It’s a natural occurrence to have these extremes, but luckily they don’t happen too often,” said Dowling. “The weather is really severe right now, but the climate is not changing that much.”
Dowling differentiated climate from weather by explaining that climate is the tracking of weather over a 30 year period, whereas weather is measured on a daily basis.
“The weather of and in itself is of interest. What’s greater interest is how human kind interacts with that weather,” said Mountain.
Advice given by both professors is simple; Dowling said to wear layers to campus. “The buildings are horribly confused,” he said.
If students enter a classroom that is warm they can take a layer off, if it is cold then leave it on.
Mountain’s advice was to just be prepared.
