Total Eclipse of the Weather
How we started with weather history and adjusted with weather forecasting
The sensory experience of a total eclipse is stunning, awe-inspiring, and unmatched by any other natural phenomenon. The light changes, dimming like sunset but without the gold and red shades and elongating shadows. Day birds stop singing, and morning and evening birds chime in with their songs. Crickets sing, cows moo and bellow. Bees and wasps go home, and flies disappear. Stillness spreads as the shadow of the moon darkens more and more of the sun - a deep stillness of Nature’s creatures, who are either in awe or confused. Winds slacken, and temperatures fall subtly. The sun’s radiation prickles less and less on upward turned faces.
Even though the light is already dimmed, the change from 99.9% totality to full totality is as abrupt as flipping a light switch. The sky darkens instantly in all directions, and stars and planets turn on their glow. Twilight hugs the horizon in all 360 degrees. It is light enough to see, but dark enough that there are no shadows. Some clouds under the path dissipate, and temperature drops substantially. Roosters may crow.
Of course, the eclipsed sun itself is a wonder. With eclipse glasses removed, human spectators can see its aura with naked eyes. We see the white corona shapeshifting around the darkened orb. We could even see little red solar flares in 2024, something we did not see with the 2017 eclipse. The sun’s power hides so much of its beauty, and for just a few moments, we get to take a peek.
Just as quickly, light returns. What seemed so dim before totality arrived is now bright compared to the totality twilight. The air smells like morning again - a little moist and verdant, like the plants exhaled after their midday nap. Dawn and twilight birds fade and day birds return with their music. Energy returns to the sun’s glow, prickling the skin again.
The build-up from partial to total eclipse seems to take so very long and the retreat so very short, even though they are equal in length. Perhaps with the climax already past, the retreat of the moon feels like something of a letdown. Perhaps the darkness of totality makes the brightness of retreat feel just a little brighter than the gradual dimming of approach. Even the retreat is a wonder, though, as nature wakes back up from its nap just a little bit confused, as if the short sleep was just a little too deep and the wake-up just a little too abrupt to shake the cobwebs.
What a wonder total solar eclipses are!
The Forecast We Could Not Afford to Miss
After we saw the August 2017 total solar eclipse in central Nebraska, my husband and I knew, without a doubt, that we would travel to see the next one in 2024. Our kid was only 2 years old in 2017, too young to take on the trip and certainly too young to understand the experience if he had been there. But we knew he’d be old enough in 2024. It was never a question of if we would go, but where.
We made our hotel reservations exactly one year before this year’s eclipse, as soon as hotel rooms in the major chains opened up for reservations. We booked in Texas. Just one room. No hedging our bets.
Why Texas? Because we knew the climatology of clouds along the total eclipse swath. Texas was the most likely to have clear skies and least likely to be fully cloudy, compared to the areas downstream like Missouri, Illinois, Ohio, and New England. We could stay the night there and position ourselves in any number of places along the eclipse path, just like we do when we’re chasing storms.
Except this time, climatology was not our friend.
Climatology is an assessment of the past, not a forecast of the future. A baseball hitter with a .400 batting average would be considered a big hitter by any measure, but they still strike out sometimes - they aren’t guaranteed a hit with every at-bat. The best poker tournament winners still lose hands. Even when the odds are stacked in favor of something, the other outcome can happen.
As the fuzzy details of the forecast one to two weeks before the eclipse came into focus, one thing that became clear was that Texas looked like the MOST likely area to be cloudy along the swath. My husband and I, both meteorologists, dug into every tool we could find in our weather forecasting toolboxes. We looked at a half dozen weather forecast models. We looked at ensemble forecast models, a fancy way of saying that the model runs dozens or hundreds of times with slightly different starting conditions or assumptions about the atmosphere to see how it affects the outcome days later. We looked at blends of all of these models. We looked at forecasts nudged by human input.
Texas looked cloudy. As the days drew closer, the confidence in clouds grew higher.
Uh oh. We needed a plan B. Why hadn’t we booked two hotel rooms in different parts of the eclipse path, like so many of our friends?
With a starting position in eastern Nebraska, we needed to find an alternative that was reachable by car. We needed to be back for our kid’s baseball game on Tuesday. We turned our attention up the eclipse path toward Missouri, Illinois, and Indiana, reachable by car in a long day’s ride and more likely to have clear skies, according to our weather forecasting tools (though it still was not a slam dunk).
My fingers scrambled as I searched for an alternative. So many places along the path had been booked up for months - a year, even. We contemplated how far outside the path we’d have to stay, how much we might have to fight traffic to get in position. Then, I found a room in the small town of Effingham, Illinois - a Best Western that still had rooms available, even if it was at the high-priced eclipse rates. And it was still a refundable rate. I booked it about a week before the eclipse and, honestly, felt pretty lucky to have found it.
We loaded up the wagon and set our course to the southeast, still a little worried about possible cirrus clouds (the high-level ones that can be anything from wispy threads to a full milky cover) but at least feeling good about our change in plans. One visit to urgent care later (because of course the kiddo developed an ear infection during the trip), and we were ready to set up on the center line.
While some people enjoy gathering with a community to witness a spectacle like a total solar eclipse, we preferred to be out on our own, where we could set up our cameras, play a little ball to pass the time, and let our awe be on full display. We found a little gravel road just outside of Albion, Illinois, right down the center line of the eclipse. We parked near a railroad track (we are rail fans, too), set up chairs and tripods, got out the eclipse glasses, and readied ourselves for the wonder of nature.
We made it. Skies were as sunny as could be overhead, with a few wisps of cirrus around the horizon but nowhere near our view of the sun.
Isn’t it amazing? Yes, the eclipse itself, but also the science of viewing one. It’s amazing that astronomers can predict eclipses centuries in advance (we are SO ready for 2044 and 2045!), within feet of the center line and microseconds of its timing. It’s amazing that we can study past cloud cover and also know when cloud behavior is going to deviate from that most likely outcome based on past history. It’s amazing that we can forecast how many water vapor molecules will reside in the atmosphere from the ground up to 30,000 feet or higher, and whether they will have enough water vapor molecule friends to obscure our view of the sun and moon in a precise four-minute window of time on a Monday afternoon.
Somewhere in the path of the solar eclipse, a few children viewed it with such wonder that they are now inspired to live it. This eclipse will make future astronomers, just like big weather events make future meteorologists.
I became a scientist for many reasons, but one of the most important ones is the sheer awe of it.
This Month in Wilder Weather History
April 14-15, 1881: “Pa, Pa, the Chinook is blowing!” The warming, snow-eating Chinook winds arrived in Dakota Territory, bringing an abrupt end to the Long Winter of 1880-1881. Temperatures had been rising above freezing more often than not starting in March, but before this abrupt change in weather, low temperatures had still been falling well below freezing. After this shift, low temperatures never fell below freezing again at most weather reporting sites around eastern South Dakota, Nebraska, Iowa, and southern Minnesota. The melt had begun, bringing with it significant flooding.
3 items…Your observation of the shadows not growing long as totality approached was neat to think back upon…I was not expecting my shadow to lengthen, but thinking back to the experience, this is yet another unique part of it! As to climatology, I believe a lot of the climatology was perhaps based upon ASOS data that did not have the added value of a human observer. Most ASOS observations will show clear skies if a cloud deck base is >12,000’. The USWB climate series which included Laredo Air Force Base 1956-1960 climate data of hourly temperature, dewpoint, wind speed/direction, cloud cover shows an average of a 51% cloud cover for April at 1 pm CDT, not the 30ish percent shown of the climatological maps being presented. We quite often will have a shallow layer of gulf moisture flowing north with morning stratus capped by warm dry air that perhaps stirs in, mixing away the stratus around 1 pm! This was the case on April 8 in Eagle Pass…fortunately, a solid deck of stratus/stratocumulus broke up enough, just in time for us to get a good view of the arrival of totality, much of totality itself, and the end of totality. Your remark concerning the forecasting of the totality down to the foot and fraction of a second brought an item that I still find remarkable: Before computers with just pencil and paper, mechanical adding machines and slide rules, the total eclipse of 1925 over New York City was forecast to have the edge of totality between 82nd and 83rd street on Manhattan Island. Observers were in place on every block from about 30th street to 135th street. The eclipse went total just 4 seconds late, and the edge of totality was between 96th and 97th street, just an error of 14 city blocks!