Free weather class! Too good to be true? No! Through UMPI’s OpenU initiative, there are five tuition-free spots, open to the general public, in the weather class I teach at UMPI.
It is important to understand if you need credit toward a degree, OpenU spots do not earn college credit. That said, it is a wonderful opportunity for the weather enthusiast!
So please join us on Mondays and Wednesdays from 12:30 to 1:45 p.m. The class begins in mid-January and runs through mid-May If you are interested, please send me an email to tshapiro@wagmtv.com or call me at WAGM. The number is 764-4461 and my extension is 261. These five free spots are offered on a first-come, first-served basis!
In a nutshell, here’s what the course is about: There are weather clues around us every single day, and they can easily be used in order to make a pretty good short-range forecast. The central theme of the course is learning how to use these weather clues so that you can make good weather decisions.
One example is that we learn how to tell if you still have at least an hour before an approaching snowstorm begins. Another example is that we learn how to tell in the morning, if there might be a thunderstorm in the afternoon. Neat stuff. Fun to learn. Fun to know. Fun to use.
Moving on, if you are eager to have sunsets start getting later, you won’t have to wait too much longer! On December 12th the sun will set in Caribou at 3:43 p.m., but on the 13th, it will set a minute later, at 3:44 p.m. Hang in there!
By the way, our longest daylight is about 7 hours, 20 minutes longer than our shortest daylight!
On another note, regarding the snow we had early last week, please don’t forget about my Facebook page, facebook.com/tedsweather If you were surprised by those terrible road conditions last Monday, you needn’t have been, as I was posting updates to my page on that developing weather situation during the weekend leading up to it.
Also, as I have mentioned before, the page is a great place for you to post what is going on where you live, so that others who may be headed in that direction can know what to expect. It is also a tremendous help to me to have your “boots-on-the-ground” reports! Thanks in advance for your help this upcoming winter!
Finally, with The County not having had much snow in November, if you were wondering about the least snowy November, that would be 1.5 inches (at Caribou). That record will not be broken this year, as the snow of last Monday was measured at 2.6 inches at Caribou.
The November with the most snow? 1974, when 34.9 inches fell. That November was the snowiest month of the entire winter of 1974-75!
Ted Shapiro holds the Broadcast Seal of Approval from both the American Meteorological Society and the National Weather Association. An Alexandria, Va. native, he has been chief meteorologist at WAGM-TV since 2006. Email him at tshapiro@wagmtv.com.
