All We Are Is Dust In the Wind

 

If you look up quotes about wind, writers wax poetically about it (as poets are wont to do). 

 

"The winds with wonder whist,

Smoothly the waters kist,

Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean..."

- John Milton, 'On The Morning Of Christ's Nativity', 1629

But quotes about the wind among farmers this winter and spring would likely to be censored for a curse word or two. 

Wind has been the topic of conversation at coffee shops, on Facebook, at church and anywhere else people gather. Observations about the violent winds can even be muttered to yourself. (Not that I'd know anything about that.)

On December 15, we had a terrible windstorm.

Photo taken from my dining room window, December 15, 2021. You couldn't see our north driveway.

From my front door, December 15, 2021. You couldn't even see the road.

 It turned the landscape into a reenactment of the Dust Bowl Days here on the Central Plains.

This was the dirt that swirled in through my front door. It was everywhere. I truly was afraid that the mighty old trees around our house would come toppling down on me. Thankfully, that didn't happen. But the replanted wheat across the road gave up its noble fight for life as the wind exerted a powerful death knell.

Photo taken on May 8, 2022

These are not the beautiful wheat photos you want to post on your blog or Facebook page. It's not what you want to drive by as you travel to and from anywhere. But the photos are reality in one of our wheat fields, just across the road from our house. Randy had to replant it last October because of some untimely rain. And then the spigot turned off, and we didn't get hardly any moisture in snow or rain this winter. The small wheat just couldn't hold on during that December 15 windstorm - or any of the other "red flag warning" days since.

 

Randy chiseled where it was blowing. He tried to roll out some hay bales. And while it helped a little, it's still been blowing on windy days. Unfortunately, December 15 wasn't the only day with excessive wind. Maybe I don't remember the specific days. (I think I'm going to remember December 15 for awhile.) But there were plenty of people - including me - complaining about the wind. During the last week in April, my weather radio siren went off, advising me of a wind warning. That was a first, too.

An article in The Topeka Capital-Journal last week confirmed what we on the Central Plains already knew: It's been an unusually windy winter and early spring.  

Here's the graph that accompanied the article:

 

Reporter Tim Hrenchir interviewed Chad Omitt, warning coordination meteorologist for the National Weather Service Office in Topeka. Omitt said the state had never seen more than 25 high wind warnings in any calendar year since it began tracking the data in 2006. Kansas has already seen 30 such warnings this year, according to data The Capital-Journal acquired from Iowa State University’s Iowa Environmental Mesonet.

Omitt said Kansas sees an average of about 11 high wind warnings per calendar year and had already seen more than twice that amount in less than four months of 2022. (And that evidently doesn't even count December 15, since it occurred in the 2021 calendar year.)

The weather service issues a high wind warning when it expects sustained winds of 40 mph or more for an hour or more and/or wind gusts of 58 mph or more for any duration. Such winds bring an increased danger for wildfires, power outages and damage from debris. (Not to mention what it does to farm ground.)

A key reason it’s been so windy this year across the region is because a very active and strong jet stream or storm track has been focused over the central Rockies into the central plains, which causes very strong areas of low pressure to form near the surface, Omitt told The Capital-Journal.

Since March, he said, that jet stream has caused numerous strong low pressure systems to develop just east of the Rocky Mountains, then head east across the region.

“When that occurs, we have very strong winds out of the south or southwest to the east or southeast of the low pressure system,” Omitt said, “and then as the low center moves away, winds become west or northwest and often tend to be nearly as strong.”

A similar phenomenon is occurring in Iowa, which is seeing a close-to-record number of wind advisories, The Des Moines Register reported.

It attributed the high number of advisories, at least in part, to Iowa’s having seen many storms this year coming out of the south, only to be followed by winds coming from the northwest, with the mixing of winds tending to increase wind gusts. Here in Central Kansas, we can relate to that!

The weather service issues a wind advisory when it expects sustained winds of 31to 39 mph for an hour or more and/or wind gusts of 46 to 57 mph for any duration.

 

I'm hoping the sun soon sets on this stint of excessive high winds! 

We did get some timely rains last week - a total of 1.5 inches during a couple of different days. The moisture prompted the wheat to head out. The next several days of unseasonably high temperatures won't do it any favors. But, at least, the moisture during heading helped give it a chance.

Photo taken May 8, 2022, after 1.5" of rain the week before.