re: Deep South Christmas COLD

I’ll take it!!!

I hope you are right

My kids will be thrilled

Was it 2018 that we had a TON of snow in Baton Rouge and Lafayette the first week of December. Like enough to make frosty the snowman and still have the ground entirely covered. Everything was truly covered in REAL snow

It snowed a ton in Dec of 2017 and a month later in Jan of 2018. That’s when we hit 14° in BR too.

quote:

---

Somehow this will change and it’ll be 78 and muggy…

---

Want to place a wager on that?

If you want a guaranteed freeze your backside off, see if you can get a week or so at Mount LeCompte Lodge in the Smokies for Christmas week. It's about 6000' there, and down here at 1000' they've dropped the predicted cold night temps ten more F degrees next week with above freezing days not happening. (Last week it looked marginally charming; today it looks bad with freezing rain (think of power lines going snap crackle pop) frozen roads and depending on our woodstove and our small generator.)

On that image, I'm not happy about how close the isobars are- the closer, the higher wind speeds.

great. my ferns finally came back to life since the last one

I have a fig tree that probably won't survive. It would be fine if the bottom would fall out and then warm up in a day or two. With five or six days of sub-freezing temps and the potential for low teens to single digit lows, I don't think it makes it. I think it was in 2015 where we hit single digits in a cold stretch, and it just about killed that tree. It took four years of new growth for it to really produce again.

quote:

---

A new Pope was selected?

---

It would be white smoke

But that’s NBR, so it’s black smoke

GFS has put snow/ice back on the table next week

Unless you’re talking about somewhere to the north, there have been no single digits in BR since ‘89.

15 in 1996 and 14 in 2018.

Could probably have hit 9 in Feb of 2021 if the clouds had cleared out.

quote:

---

I have a fig tree that probably won't survive. It would be fine if the bottom would fall out and then warm up in a day or two. With five or six days of sub-freezing temps and the potential for low teens to single digit lows, I don't think it makes it. I think it was in 2015 where we hit single digits in a cold stretch, and it just about killed that tree. It took four years of new growth for it to really produce again.

---

I've heard the trick is to wrap it heavily with incandescent Christmas lights (NOT THE LED ONES) and then to wrap it with burlap or the tree bags and then to tie it below the branches so there is no room for cold air to access the buds and foilage.

Combining the two is supposed to add 5-10 degrees to ambient air temp.

The other approach i've read is that the commercial citrus operations will take a sprinkler and run it to freeze the trees solid but it seems too extreme for me so I've never tried it.