Arctic Ice

If following this path for environmental reasons, then go right ahead, as long as you are not 'stealing' from some downstream user's water rights. Not a legal issue everywhere, but a very big deal in some places such as the Colorado River Basin.

If implementing this as a money saving measure, check up on your actual utility water cost first. Looking at rates for my district and an adjacent district, a 40-gallon barrel will offset about $0.16 to 0.75 of local utility water, depending on district, usage tier, and time of year. Huntsville AL, it would be just $0.07 at first-tier rate. Just across the mountains from me, at Leavenworth WA, the basic connection charge includes a very large 'free' usage allowance, triple what my household actually uses, so the incremental value of that barrel full of saved rainwater is literally $zero.

So before spending money on the barrels or garbage cans, downspout diverters, pumps, hoses and fittings, etc., figure out how many container-fulls of saved water you will need to collect and use for "breakeven". How many container-fulls of water will you collect and use per year, considering that much of the available rain may arrive during seasons when you don't have use for collected water. Depending on your local circumstances, "payback" may be impractical or even impossible.

At spouses request, we have several rainwater collection barrels, some acquired via estate / yard sale. I'm under no illusion of ever "breaking even".

Don't even think of putting rain-barrel water into a drip irrigation system, unless you have a very good filter. The tree debris and other junk in my rain barrels would clog the tiny orifices of our irrigation drippers, requiring replacement at much greater cost than the saved water. I've needed to shoot down this idea every time the spouse suggests it.

Watering cans and regular garden hoses (without sprinklers) are fine with rain-barrel water.

 

Waste heat inside conditioned spaces is certainly a big deal when trying to cool those same spaces.

But is waste heat, in itself, a significant contributor to climate change? I didn't think so. I was under the impression that how the exhaust gases and particulates interact with sunlight, after being exhausted from our machines, vastly exceeds the original heat released by the fuels' combustion.

Therefore, efficient use of fossil fuels is necessary not for reducing waste heat, but instead for reducing the combustion exhausts.

 

rain barrels are encouraged here fo water conservation. there is no such thing as downstream water rights in the northeast, however, laws are slowly being enacted regulating groundwater rights. they are being taken away from local owners and given to large corporations buying up domestic water supply and distribution.

 

the water bill is not typically a big ticket item for most households. I started monitoring our billed usage around the turn of the century and the quarterly high for one bill was 18k gals. I've slowly reduced our quarterly usage over the years and have only had to deal with one or two issues in the 100 year old plumbing drainage. The big one was after installing a dual flush 1.1 / 1.6 gpf that didn't provide enough flow and started to back up one summer. I found adding an extra gal every few flushes solved that while reducing our usage a few k gals per quarter. Our last quarterly bill came in at a bit under 5K gals but our bill has remained virtually unchanged at just shy of $50 since I started watching it. offtopic: while our electric rate has gone from $ 0.12 /kWh average 4 years ago to $0.19 /kwh average and I'm no longer able to get even one utility bill a year under $100, much less 6 a year. I'm sure glad it's not as high as PGEs rates all things considered.

I use our collected runoff for watering plants and trying to keep the compost moist. I'm completely out of storage water ATM, and the forecasted rain in our area looks like it's been following the jet stream and falling mostly on the other side of the Lake and way up into northern Canada. But I'm setup to put my collection system back in place at the first signs of any collectible precipitation.

 

Most water bills around here are bi-monthly, i.e. every 2 months. Adjusted to the same quarterly cycle you have, my base connection charge would be $108 even before any water is consumed.

Only a quarter of my latest water bill is for water usage, the rest is fixed. And this is a bit high for before garden watering season, we must be flushing the toilets a lot more as we get older.

It used to be much worse back when this district's base charge was proportional to the water meter capacity. Nearly all single family homes here have 3/4" meters, with a rated meter capacity of 20 gpm. But the very few of us with fire sprinklers are required to have 1" meters, with a rated meter flow capacity of 50 gpm. Ergo, our base connection charge was multiplied by (50/20) = 2.5X, which over time made the water utility connection charge for merely having fire sprinklers, vastly more expensive than the sprinkler installation cost, even though these sprinklers cut average firefighting water usage (from hydrants on the very same water mains) by 90%. After a couple rounds of unsuccessful challenges from me, some state legislators in far-away districts who were also firefighters pushing to require fire sprinklers in all new homes, took up this challenge. In cooperation with other water districts without this 'sprinkler surcharge', they pushed legislation and held hearings that shamed my water district and others like it to remove their 'fire sprinkler surcharge'. Much more recently, the local building code finally began requiring sprinklers in all new construction, not just those beyond a certain distance from the nearest hydrant.

 

The county installed new wireless meters a few years ago and also put in new PVC to connect the service to the mains last winter. So I have a nice old cruddy galvanized 3/4" left behind that should be a nice grounding point for most anything electric.

I remember the winter of 22 or 23 reading stories of Antarctica having a heat wave into the 60 F range and seeing pictures of lakes forming in the ice valleys. Last winter I read about the Austrailians monitoring the Antarctic coastline and commenting that earlier this year and late last year was the first time they'd noticed a visible land based shoreline on the continent.

If anyone has ever watched the windstream maps @fuzzy1 , most days both summer and winter downunder and around the Antarctic continent the windstream graphics show enormous swirling masses that remind me of the tiny looking in comparison huge hurricanes as seen on the same windstream maps we get up here in the northern hemisphere. Now I get a better idea of why Cape Horn has such a nasty reputation for bad weather at sea.

 

water is reasonable around here, but sewerage costs a fortune

 

we're allowed a second meter for outdoor usage which doesn't use sewerage, and take short showers!

 

My parents might have a second meter for the sprinklers. Won't add to sewerage costs, but might be higher water rates to discourage excess use.

 

Back when my sewer district based rates on water usage, they used average winter water use as a proxy for indoor summer use, so customers were not charged for estimated outdoor use during irrigation season.

That ended long ago, now they charge a flat rate per household, no longer linked to the water meter. Though I believe some neighboring sewer districts still use a water meter model.

 

flat rate is like the hybrid tax in some states. doesn't account for heavier or lighter users.

 

The great majority of my water bill is also equivalent to a flat tax.

 

As we are not discussing Arctic ice here anyway, I'll pose a question. It is well known that during summer months the sun does not set 'up there'. Possibly less well known that it never rises high in the sky, but circles just above the horizon (day after day after day).
The question is, from the perspective of a local observer, does the sun circle clockwise or anti clockwise?
Answering from mental visualization rather than looking at a globe would be more impressive. But we'll never know, will we?
Bonus, this apparent solar motion provides fatuous support for the flat-earth hypothesis. Hope that helps you win bar bets in future.

 

Oppositely in South polar region in December etc. This would seem to favor logistics of toy manufacture there which never seems to have caught on.

 

Looks like my memory of a 60 F day in Antarctica during the march 2022 heatwave there is incorrect according to what I'm currently reading (link below). It made sense to me at the time seeing pictures of clear blue melt water on the ice (I'm still looking for similar photos I saw a few years ago). Current writeups on the issue as well as ones dated back to 2022 list the temp anomaly as 40 C above normal local temps. The weird part to me is that along with the 40 C mark I've seen variations in the conversion of 40 C to F ranging from 72 F to 104 F .
What ever happened during March 2022 on the Antarctica continent, there are a lot of different accounts of it and assumptions about it actually means.

While looking for links about what I brought up in this thread I've seen references that describe the March 2020 weather as two atmospheric rivers flowing over both poles.

Jeff Masters wrote the original weather underground telnet lists at the UofM ann arbor as seen on the weather underground wiki page. Bob Hanson was a partner contributor in later years. oddly not credited on the weather underground wiki page.

a link to Bob Hensons' writeup dated 23 March 2022 published at Yale Climate Connections (YCC)
How this month produced a mind-boggling warm-up in eastern Antarctica (and the Arctic) » Yale Climate Connections

I still read wunderground.com even though it was acquired by the weather channel llc in 2019 and was, until recently as I'm finding out today, hosted and or owned by IBM.
Francisco Partners Set to Acquire The Weather Company Assets from IBM | Morningstar

Back to March 2022 NASAs writeup / satelite data
Ice Shelf Collapse in East Antarctica

There are many more links using search terms
antarctica march 2022
using any search engine.

 

While searching for photos of the clear blue ice melt I'd seen a few years ago, I've read that March is when the sun starts to set on the antarctica continent, for our northern hemisphere summers, antarcticas winter.

I've also wondered about how to get a better perspective of the continents geography, because it's still quite confusing to me to understand which directions east and west are and if the international date line is the dividing line between the two.

I was thinking a 3d map might help. Understanding the earths wabble and both poles day versus night seasons might take more in-depth analysis that just looking at a map.

 

"The weird part to me is that along with the 40 C mark I've seen variations in the conversion of 40 C to F ranging from 72 F to 104 F."


I love this! This conversion should not include using the 32 oF baseline for conversion from oC to oF because it is a difference of differences. Note what 104 minus 72 is, and share my joy.

"Jeff Masters wrote the original weather underground telnet lists ..." Wow those were the days eh?

==
There are many science outposts in Antarctica and all that measure air T will be using fancy devices. I suppose that all such records are compiled somewhere.

 

"March is when the sun starts to set on the antarctica continent ..."

Equinox. Equal night in English.

 

I hope people recognize that, within a given hemisphere (north or south), the sun appears to move the same direction, regardless of which side of the Arctic / Antarctic Circle one stands on. Regardless of whether it sets or not. The right direction up here, the 'wrong' direction down there.

I'll leave the translation to clockwise or anti clockwise as an exercise for the reader.

A distressingly common 'journalism' error, where non-science writers or editors simply plug a number into a temperature conversion app, without having any real understanding. It gets funnier when the published stories shows a positive F increment, and give a translation in C showing a negative increment.