by CKR
I have skipped some of my Tuesday blogging lately because WhirledView has had so many unscheduled and photogenic visitors. The roadrunner still comes to eat the suet and throw it around. A couple of neighborhood dogs scarffed the suet up the other day, but I can tell when the roadrunner eats, because some of the suet has been tossed around. I didn’t see her yesterday, but she came around noon, which has been her preferred time lately. Then something cleaned it all up last night.
Sometimes she comes by while I’m sitting in the living room reading. She seems to find me as fascinating as I find her and looks curiously through the glass door at me. If I stay reasonably still, she doesn’t flush, although she may casually find a reason to head off into the yard.
We’ve also had a fair bit of snow, too, which keeps me shoveling. Today it was a relief not to wake up to another layer.
As I’ve shoveled and used the snow blower, I’ve thought about albedo and its uses. You may have heard the word in connection with global warming. An easy way to think about it is the ability to reflect light. As we lose ice and snow in glaciers and polar caps, the earth’s albedo goes down and more light is absorbed. That light turns into heat, so the process of losing glaciers and polar caps may be self-stoking.
But lowering the albedo is a good thing when I’m shoveling snow. The difference in albedo between shoveled asphalt and unshoveled snow is obvious in the first photo. Even that inch or two of snow is awfully white and reflective. Leave it on the driveway and it might melt, or it might not. Those little dark pebble peaks absorb the sun, though, and melt the adjacent snow. All the time, as the black patches grow, the albedo is decreasing and more light is absorbed to heat the asphalt. Then there is just wet asphalt, and then, dry. The last photo was taken when the air temperature was 21 F.