Day 44: …And Hawaii By An Inch!
I woke up this morning feeling good about what was accomplished regarding the Snow Shot of America project, but slightly disappointed that I ended the day with 49/50 states (along with Washington D.C.). To come so far and end up being just short of your goal is a bit saddening. After going through some of the emails that came overnight (and being told a couple more times that it could never snow in Hawaii), I decided I needed to spend some time working on my dissertation research (severe thunderstorms and tornadoes related things). After all, for the past two days, the Snow Shot of America project took over my life.
This evening after dinner I happened to check the Snow Shot email address expecting to see more emails. However, one of the emails caught my attention. It said:
Hi again Patrick.
I read today on NPR that you now have photos of current snow from every state but Hawaii. Last night I sent you two photos of current snow on Hawaii’s Mauna Kea. Did you not receive them? They were only a 2-3 megabytes each. I’ll send them again if you somehow did not receive them.
Best wishes,
Tom Geballe
My heart skipped a beat. I didn’t remember getting an email from someone in Hawaii. After frantically searching through the emails, I found his original email that stated
Here are a couple of a very few patches of snow not far from the 13,796 foot summit of Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. We spotted them on the way up to the Gemini Telescope, where I have been observing tonight. The images were taken by my son at about 7pm (on Feb 12). They are the last remnants of a snowfall in November and have survived this long because they are on steep north-facing slopes. As Mauna Kea is the highest mountain in Hawaii, it is extremely unlikely that there is snow anywhere else in this state.
The email also contained the following two photographs.
Could it be true? I emailed Tom back just as quickly as I could and was told that the photos were legitimate and that his son, Matt Geballe, and his son’s friend, Greg Warren, also saw the snow and that they actually took the photographs. I was also told that there were a couple other photographs of the snow as well, including the following iPhone photograph.
I immediately sent the photographs to the National Weather Service office in Honolulu, Hawaii to examine the photographs to make sure that everything looked legitimate. After reviewing the photographs for a little bit, they asked if there were any wide angle shots that would show a portion of the observatory as well to help identify where the photographs were taken and help solidify that the photographs were taken where they said they were. About that same time, I received an email from Matt that contained the following photograph.
After giving the Honolulu National Weather Service office a chance to digest the information and discuss amongst themselves I received the following
A few of us have taken a look at the pics–and we can’t find any evidence to suggest there’s something obviously wrong with the pictures. The zoomed in pics definitely look like snow. The time stamp info on the photo jives with the setting sun off the frame to the right, indicating he’s looking at a north facing exposure. The two telescopes in the background match our map of the observatories (Gemini and UH88). One of the forecasters mentioned that temperatures a couple days in January exceeded 50 degrees, and there have been plenty more days above freezing since the last snow. After speaking with a foreaster from Anchorage AK, they mentioned that in Denali, sometimes clumps of snow will hang around with temps into the 60s and 70s (though they have a lot more snow than what fell on the summits). The extremely dry air most of the time may have hindered melting.
Edit: I have been informed that the two telescopes in the pictures are the NASA Infared Telescope on the left (not the UH 88 inch telescope) and Gemini on the right. The snow patch was not on the slope of the summit cone, but on the slope of an adjacent cone to the west, whose peak is about 200 feet lower than the summit cone.
I have since been told that, as of this writing, there still exists some small patches of snow on the north northwest slope, but that in the coming days it will most likely all be gone.
And with that, I have good reason to believe that on 12 February 2010, there was snow on the ground in all 50 states (and Washington D.C.) simultaneously. Not a lot of snow in every state, but thanks to the adventurous spirits of three four individuals, there is photographic proof of some small snow patches in Hawaii, and this completes the Snow Shot of America!
Edit: The following six photos were taken this evening (13 February 2010) using an iPhone. The white patch in the middle is the same white patch in the photo above. These photographs are geotagged automatically by the iPhone and contain the exact location of where the photos were taken. I have not provided a map with the images plotted on them (I will do so soon), I have verified using Google Maps that these photos were taken on the north northwest slope of Mauna Kea. These photographs were taken by Jesse Ball, the telescope operator at Gemini.
Updated @ 10:55 AM CST 14 February 2010… I wanted to add attention to a comment posted below by Dan Birchall, who is trained to operate the Subaru Telescope on Mauna Kea, which is run by the National Astronomical Observatory of Japan. He took additional photographs of the snow on Mauna Kea, HI on Saturday, 13 February 2010. These pictures were taken during the daylight and contain more perspective on where the snow was observed. http://www.naoj.org/staff/djb/snow50.html
Note: Tom Geballe obtained a PhD in physics in 1974 under Prof. Charles Townes at U.C. Berkeley. Following postdoctoral fellowships at Berkeley, Leiden, and a Carnegie Fellowship at Hale Observatories in Pasadena, he became a staff astronomer at the United Kingdom Infrared Telescope in 1981. He was Astronomer-in-charge, Associate Director, and Head of Operations at UKIRT from 1987 until 1998. Among his research interests are the galactic center, the physics of quiescent and shocked molecular clouds, the late stages of stellar evolution, the composition of interstellar dust, the surfaces, atmospheres, and aurorae of planets and moons, and brown dwarfs. Recent significant first author papers include several on spectroscopy and classification of brown dwarfs, the detection of H3+ in both dark and diffuse interstellar clouds, and the infrared evolution of Sakurai’s Object. He currently works with the Gemini Observatory on the summit of Mauna Kea, HI.
