Word: weather
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1980-1989
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Last fall the mountain known in Tibet as Chomolungma, or Goddess Mother of the World, and in the West as Everest permitted itself to be climbed by 33 people, withheld permission (in the form of benign weather) from a much larger number and killed nine climbers. Are those good odds or bad? A flatlander's question, an observer decides, after asking it of Stacy Allison and Peggy Luce; to mountaineers, the answer is a shrug. The odds are the odds. Allison, a contractor and house framer from Portland, Ore., and Luce, a bicycle messenger from Seattle, members...
...period authenticities and relentlessly violent plot practically guarantee Billy Bathgate a sale to the movies. Good luck to all concerned, for the novel's greatest strength resides in its least cinematic feature. Billy's language -- breathy, breakneck, massing phrases into great cumulus sentences that rumble with coming rough weather -- is totally unlike the short, syncopated rhythms of Ragtime. At first, readers may wonder how this young, confessed truant has run across terms like "dissynchronously" or where he picked up the poetic skills to describe a waterfall: "At the very bottom there hovered a perpetually shimmering rainbow as if not water...
...weather experts point out that there are no records of back-to-back nationwide droughts. In Ohio and Indiana, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana, and the snowpacks of the Rockies, the grim dryness seems at last to have been broken. But in the Missouri River basin and the Pacific Northwest and along parts of the East Coast, the debilitating moisture deficits remain...
Donald Gilman, the National Weather Service's long-range forecaster, is cautiously hoping that the tropical Pacific's El Nino and the North American jet stream will keep behaving, so that eventually rainstorms will be lured up from the Gulf to drench the croplands. Kentucky and Tennessee last week got a bit of that action. But many more downpours are needed. Iowa's rich loam has only a third of the usual subsoil moisture. Hydrologists have warned New York that if reservoirs do not fill soon, the city could have water shortages this summer. With California reservoirs at 42% capacity...
...Ellis County, Kans., is one of them. Day and night he looks for damp, heavy clouds. Mostly he sees bright moon and sun. "It is the dryest I can remember," he says. He has been there 58 years. Then there are the ominous, almost eerie, changes in the weather. One night three weeks ago, he was in shirt-sleeves, tending his Herefords. Within 60 hours the temperature fell from 86 degrees F to -13 degrees F, an unheard of plunge of 99 degrees. Schmeidler coped. Two calves were born in the middle of a freezing night. He got them into...