Baby it’s cold – and rainy – outside
I’m on the west coast for a while, visiting friends and family. It’s been raining incessantly and the forecast is for more of the same.
Cold rain in the winter – ugh! Then again, I’m happy to be here and especially to spend time with my grandchildren while they’re still young.
We had a cold snap in southern Ohio that had temps down into single digits, then four inches of snow three days ago, and daytime temps are now in the high forties.
Meanwhile, for those who fancy some niche sport information, a good friend just yesterday flew a glider from Minden to Garden City, Kansas, a distance of 1133 statute miles with a flight time of around 10 hours. The glider carries an enormous amount of oxygen and has a small jet engine for the launch. He retracts the engine after launch and it stays retracted the rest of the flight (with an electronic sensor to mark his electronic flight log when the engine is running.). The pilot has been flying in mountain wave for about 30 years and is very accomplished. I made several flights with him in mountain wave when I lived there.
The pilot is a professional pilot with Fedex and has special arrangements with Air Traffic Control to fly in Class A (controlled) airspace. His highest altitude was around 28,000 feet MSL. The flight trace was available in real time on several different apps and I watched it as it was taking place. A great flight!
Enjoy your family, Neo!
Enjoy the time with your family, Neo!
Jolly good !
But what is “mountain wave”?
Here in the mountains of western NC, we’ve had no snow, and it will be 65º and sunny on Christmas Day.
Lol…just been reading about my old town in CT…now without power for 36 hrs. Typical for CT and the poor response from Eversource despite charging people 33 cents/kwh…one of the highest in the nation. So glad I’m gone.
Enjoy Neo. We also are up north with our grands, 1st the East Bay, then Carmel. More fun to be had when it isn’t raining.
Cicero:
Under the right conditions of wind speed, direction and stability, wind flowing over a land mass and falling, will “bounce” up and down in undulations. Think what happens in a river when water flows over a rock and comes back up on the lee side. Mountain ranges in NV, UT and CO are oriented generally north-south and the wind is frequently from the west, setting up good conditions for the wind to undulate up and down in parallel bands that stretch for miles. My friend has studied this for many years and taught himself how to ride the rising band and fly fast to the next one.
Mountain wave exists in many places around the world, but some of the best is kicked off by the Sierra Nevada range in Nevada and by the Andes in Argentina.
Neo, enjoy. Family is the most important thing.
It will be dry and 67 degrees here in CO on Christmas. We need some of your West Coast Rain.
Today, not above 41, complete overcast. Dreary day
Your rain in CA is part of an “atmospheric river” bringing in huge amounts of rain into CA and especially in the Pacific Northwest. We live in SW Washington state, about an hour’s drive north of Portland. As of my typing this, we have 16.89 inches of rain SO FAR in December. It is raining now, in fact. Roads closed, flooding wiping out houses and businesses. And, to add to the fun, the swollen rivers and creeks running from the Mt. St. Helens volcano are washing large quantities of ash left from the eruption of May, 1980, reducing their flow rates and making a huge mess of ash along banks and low areas.
…a good friend just yesterday flew a glider from Minden to Garden City, Kansas, a distance of 1133 statute miles with a flight time of around 10 hours.
F:
Sounds glorious!
I read about gliders a long time ago. The tech has come a long ways.
Neo: “I’m happy to be here and especially to spend time with my grandchildren while they’re still young.” Yeah, as they get older they tend to make your hair turn gray. 🙂
F: thanks for the mountain wave explanation. Interesting, that we can learn enough about wind to make what seems a chaotic phenomenon into something sort of predictable. Analogous to the North-South circulations due to thermal warming. Or hurricane tracking.
It’s rainy & cold, but no snow, in Bratislava. Also rainy in Kenya, where we visited in September. Now with floods.
Also in Palestine, with some crazies blaming the Jews for such weather.
73 in Puerto Rico at 7am with a high of 83. I wanted to be somewhere warm for the family Christmas vacation and found it.
We chose PR the year it’s been unseasonably warm back warm!
https://x.com/i/status/2002471757593391597
The original I think.
@kate- We spent the past summer on border of East Tn and Western NC. We attended Christ the King Anglican in Boone several times.
F,
On mountain waves: I did my PPL training through the Colorado State flying club. CSU had a one runway airport to support their forestry program…Cristman field. I arrived one day to get my scheduled lesson. Beautiful, sunny, calm wind. My instructor met me and told me all planes are grounded. Shocked, I said why? He said look up… see those lenticular clouds just ahead of the foothills? He told me those form at the crests of mountain waves. The airport snuggled right up against the foothills (we had no left downwind pattern on the west side of the airport), so was particularly susceptible to mountain waves. Had to get clear out towards Greeley or Ft. Morgan before the danger decreased.
Sennacherib,
I believe the story behind the original is it was something Frank Loesser and his wife would sing for fun at their Holiday party and guests encouraged them to publish it.
There are two versions in the film, “Neptune’s Daughter.” The first is the traditional male – female version where Ricardo Montalban is trying to seduce Esther Williams. The second, the one you linked, is a comedic spoof with an eager young woman trying to get a man.
Rufus,
Was she successful?
I have flown in mountain wave, and also in the “rotor” turbulence below it, by accident. Turbulence in the latter was so strong that my eyeballs were bouncing around in my head, and I could not read the instruments! Yipes!
After I launched, towed by a light power plane, the tow-pilot landed and taxied to a stop. When he was reminded that more gliders were waiting for a tow, he just said “No more flying today!” and went into his camper and poured himself a scotch. When I got down, after kissing the ground, I joined him!
@mark: We’re south of Asheville, so quite a drive from Boone.
As long as it *stays* water.
Ice storms produce the most lovely scenes on earth, especially when the freezing rain is over snow, as long as you don’t see any of the broken trees.
(Because snow falls when it rises too high. Ice *sticks*.)
Raucously noisy, bone-chilling rain on the roof – instead of snow – is one of the best parts of moving from NYC to Israel.
We live in the central mountains, and have had snow-that-sticks exactly once in 20 years. A whole inch! for most of a whole day! And unlike New Yawk snow it stayed white.
I’ll take my snow in photographs, thanks.
Physics Guy and Ray Van Dune:
Ah, rotor! I didn’t mention that. One dare not tempt the gods by badmouthing rotor, and Minden is right under the worst of it.
When I was towing into rotor I was always eager to have the glider release as soon as we felt the first signs of laminar flow, because it was nasty stuff and I knew I’d have to return to the airport through the worst of it. It always made the hair on my neck stand up. The friend who just made the long flight to Kansas used to have me tow him into wave and he was never in a hurry to release no matter how many times I’d ask him if he was ready.
My worst experience was with a pilot who was not confident towing into wave so I went along as instructor/safety pilot. He rolled inverted as soon as we hit rotor and shouted “you’ve got it!” I released around 6,500′ AGL in a column of air that was sinking fast. It took me a full ten seconds (on the logger) to get us out of the dive, at which point we had lost 4,000′. I asked him if he wanted the control back and he said “you keep it. Take me home.” Remembering it still gives me chills.
My worst experience in rotor
Cold rain’s gonna fall.
“California is the Fraud Capital of America…”—
https://instapundit.com/764090/
…which should certainly make Tim Walz and Keith Ellison feel a whole lot better…
(Gosh! That Harris/Walz—Cal/Minn—ticket was really something!)
But not so fast, Timmy:
‘…”The amount of money that’s been stolen is larger than the entire GDP of Somalia’—
https://instapundit.com/764006/
And then there’s the rain in Maine (and no doubt many other places)….
“Maine’s Medicaid program bilked out of millions of dollars in Somali fraud, whistleblower claims”—
https://nypost.com/2025/12/10/us-news/maines-medicaid-program-bilked-out-of-millions-of-dollars-in-somali-fraud-whistleblower-claims/
File under: (Rotheringham) Rape of America
Um, Rotherham…
+ Bonus!
“$14 TRILLION NGO EMPIRE: TAX EXEMPT, VOTER PROOF;
“An essay citing Federal Reserve Financial Accounts says U.S. NGOs held $14.12 trillion in assets as of Q2 2025, which is bigger than the combined 2025 GDP of Japan, Germany, and India …”
https://instapundit.com/763895/
physicsguy
Lol…just been reading about my old town in CT…now without power for 36 hrs.
Ice storms and downed power lines. Nothing new here. My NE CT hometown had an ice storm in Dec ’73 that knocked power out for five days. Good thing we had a fireplace—which my father had installed some time back. We had a gas stove, so primitive that it didn’t use electric ignition, for cooking meals during the power outage.