How to pick a halloween costume appropriate in Boulder

Take a costume you might wear anywhere else, and add “skanky” in front of it. It’s really easy; here’s some ideas:

- Skanky angel
- Skanky devil-creature-thing
- Skanky nurse
- Skanky dentist
- Skanky whale biologist
- Skanky garbage collector
- Skanky Dwight Shrute

Thanks.
Dan

sometimes in Boulder we have a climate

The El Nino Southern Oscillation (ENSO) forecasts trend positive right now and deepen toward winter, suggesting an El Nino year brought on by warmer waters in the southern Pacific Ocean.  The effects of this on your weather vary with your location.

Here in Boulder, thanks to our high density of climate research scientists, we have a lot of different types of climate data available for our perusal online, if you look for a little bit.  What is the effect of El Nino in Boulder?  A good summary can be found here, I’m definitely not the first person to think about this.  The long and short of that article is that when El Nino comes around, our average temperatures don’t change much, but our average snowfall does.  On average, El Nino winters  are drier than other years, but then when March rolls around, the mean monthly snowfall rises from 17in to 23in.

Comparing historical temperature data for the ENSO phenomenon against historical snowfall data in Boulder gives a finer-grained picture.  Looking at our winters during strong El Nino (1957-58, 1963-64, 1965-66, 1972-73, 1982-83, 1986-87-88, 1991-92, 1994-95, 2002-2003), most had outlier months with unusual amounts of snow:  November (1972-73, 1986-87, 1991-92, 1994-95), December (1972-73, 1982-83, 1987-88), January (1986-87), February (1965-66, 1986-87, 2002-03), March (1963-64, 1982-83, 1986-87, 1987-88, 2002-03 right after spring break iirc ) and/or April (1957-58, 1963-64, 1972-73, 1982-83, 1994-95).

Moral of the story: I expect to get socked with at least one really wet month this winter.

I’d like to try some more proper statistics on this with less handwaving if I get an opportunity, hopefully I will.