Ramblings of a Graduate Student

Thanks to the hard work by Carnegie Mellon Civil Engineering student, Nick Doiron, I am pleased to announce that a method of efficiently moving the 1000+ photographs from email to Google Maps has been found!  The website that will host all of the Snow Shot of America photographs can be viewed here: Snow Shot of America.  Please know that we are still debugging and testing things so expect some problems in the short term.  With this said, photographs should begin to start appearing in the coming days.  It will take a while to get through all of them, but through the website above, people can start to view the photographs just as soon as they have been uploaded.

If you have any suggestions or notice any problems, please don’t hesitate to let me know via the comments!

Lastly, Laban West of Yukon, OK has provided me with this overview image displaying photographs from each state in a single image.  Thanks, Laban!

I have received compliments about the success of this project from all over the world. However, the truth is that something of this magnitude could never have happened alone. I am forever indebted to the individuals across the United States who, in the midst of these trying times, took time out of their busy lives to take a photograph and send an email to someone they probably have never met and quite possibly never will. To those who have contributed, or merely just wished me well, from the bottom of my heart, thank you very much. If we ever cross paths in the future, please consider taking a moment and introducing yourself. I really would like to meet as many of the individuals as possible who have helped make this project a success.

As much as I would love to take credit for coming up with the idea behind Snow Shot of America, I would be remiss if I did not share credit with Missouri based photographer, Alexis Norin.  She first mentioned how cool it would be to get a picture of the snow in all 50 states.  It was this comment that inspired me to try and make that a reality.  This was the birth of what has now become the Snow Shot of America project.

Also, Tom & Matt Geballe, Greg Warren, and Dan Birchall deserve a ton of credit for their willingness to trek down the side of Mauna Kea’s steep north slope to document what snow remained from November and December snows in Hawaii.

I owe a big thank you to my lovely wife, Sarah, for putting up with me these past 48 hours.  Only someone with your kind of patience could have dealt with such a stressed and frazzled husband.  Thank you.

Lastly, thanks must be given to each and every person who helped spread the word about this project.  Without your help, the rapid dissemination of information regarding this project that had to happen for it to be a success never would have happened.  This truly was/is a country-wide project.

Now that I have photographs from all 50 states, I am being asked, “What’s next?”.  To begin, I have put together a slideshow containing at least one photograph or webcam picture from every state and that can be viewed here.  Next, I will begin what I imagine will be a relatively slow process of processing all the emails I have received of snow from all across the United States. At last count I had received almost 875 unique emails (this does not count replies and multiple emails sent with the same subject) and am still receiving more as I type this.  As I go through the emails and download the photographs (not to mention attempting to give as much credit to the individuals who took the photographs as possible), I hope to be able to respond personally to everyone who submitted a photograph.  This will take some time, so if you submitted a photograph, please do not take offense if it takes a while to hear back from me.  There is only one of me, and hundreds of you.

I still plan on trying to put all of the photographs into some sort of apparatus that would allow people to see where each photo was taken.  Initially, I intended this to be a Google Earth KML file, but based on the number of photographs I have received, this file would end up being very large and take a very long time to download.  I’m still trying to work out the exact logistics of the final product, but I promise to give periodic updates on the progress.  I will certainly make an announcement when major milestones are achieved and when the final product is completed.

The Snow Shot of America project has been a huge whirlwind for me. What started off as a single Tweet on Thursday has grown into a project that has touched all 50 states, our nation’s capital, Canada, Europe, and Australia.  I have learned a lot of valuable lessons from this project such as to respect the power of social media, especially Facebook, Twitter, and personal blogs; to appreciate the value of public radio in reaching a wide audience; and to stand in awe of the countless citizens of this country who will help a complete stranger achieve his or her goal.  However, of all the lessons I have learned from this project, the most important lesson is to never completely give up hope when you believe in something.  If there is a will, it will find a way – and there will be others along the way to lend a helping hand.

Thank you.

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.

As many of you may already know, I’m currently attempting to take “a snow shot of America” tomorrow.  For those who don’t know what that is, you may be wondering what on earth is “a snow shot of America”.  Simply put, it is a collage of pictures taken of the snow on the ground from every state.  Why tomorrow?  There is a chance that there will be snow on the ground in all 50 states at the same time.  It is unclear if this has ever happened in recorded history.

Above is this morning’s National Snow Analysis; it excludes Alaska and Hawaii, but I’ll get to those states in a minute.  As you can see by looking at the analysis, snow exists in same form or fashion in every one of the contiguous states, with the exception of Louisiana and Florida.  However, a storm moving across the southern United States is poised to change that map drastically by tomorrow.  Local National Weather Service offices in the Deep South are currently forecasting up to an 1″ of snow as far south as the beaches of far western Florida Panhandle.  2-4″ may be possible in areas just north of Pensacola, FL.

Below is the current National Watch/Warning graphic.  The hot pink color is Winter Storm Warnings.  It isn’t very often you see these extended all the way to the Gulf Coast.  Nor do you see it over such a large area this far south.  Here’s to hoping for Florida snow tomorrow!

Now, about Alaska and Hawaii…Alaska has a lot of snow in the state, so I’ve never worried about them.  I was led to believe based on a The Weather Channel tweet that there was snow in the mountains of Hawaii.  This seemed perfectly logical to me, so I didn’t question it too much.  Old webcam images showed snow, and a blizzard in the past few weeks blanketed the mountains.  However, further investigation has led doubt to finding snow on the mountains.  It certainly seems possible that there is snow in a sheltered patch, however, finding the snow will be tough.  I keep reminding myself that “absence of evidence is not necessarily evidence of absence”.  In other words, just because we can’t find it, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.  Here’s to trying!

In any event, Florida snow is more rare than Hawaiian snow, so getting 49/50 and the 48 contiguous states is still an impressive feat!