Phillip's Natural World: Atlanta Paralyzed by Ice and Snow: Ice-pocalypse

Metro Atlanta Prepares for

6 Inches of Snow

Officials say they are not taking any chances on the predicted snow this weekend turning into another Snowmageddon. Currently its looking more like an ice event as storms lingered over Atlanta longer than predicted dropping as much as 2/10ths of an inch of freezing rain (see below).

Ice and snow hit metro Atlanta Friday night. JOHN SPINK / JSPINK@AJC.COM

The Georgia Department of Transportation is loading trucks with brine to salt roads in metro Atlanta ahead of the anticipated storm, spokeswoman Natalie Dale said, hoping to avoid another massive Snow Jam like the last time snow visited Atlanta in January of 2014.

Follow the Developing

Snow/Ice Storm

on twitter

@NWSAtlanta

Nieve? Si! 2-6” en el Norte de GA, empezando esta noche. Manténgase alerta a los mensajes NWS.

Snowzilla (2003, 2009, 2010, 2014. . .take your pick). Its always a mess when Snowpocalypse visits the South.

Metro Atlanta and parts of North Georgia could get between 4 and 6 inches of snow and a mix of ice and freezing rain this weekend, according to the latest projection.

Winter Storm Helena

Dubbed by commercial weather forecasters as "Winter Storm Helena," it appears the predictions were a little on the conservative side. While forecasters had the timing right they were not expecting so much snow and ice accumulation only a couple days ago (see below).

The best chance for snow is Friday night and into Saturday morning, Channel 2 Action News meteorologist Brad Nitz said Wednesday afternoon on twitter (below).

Snowmageddon Redux?

The last major snowstorm to hit Atlanta, on January 28, 2014, became known by some as "Snow Jam" and others as "Snowmageddon" because it paralyzed Atlanta for days.

There is now 100% certainty that snow will begin to fall soon, where it isn't already falling. Icy roads will likely be covered by 4-6" of snow in the metro Atlanta area.

A brief, light wintry mix is occurring in heavy precipitation and 33° (1°C) at 2:00 pm on Jan 6, 2017.

With temps forecast in the 20°s, Nitz said expect the snow to stick. Saturday’s expected low is 27°.

The storm has the potential to deliver heavy snow, causing slippery travel along a 1,000-mile swath in the southern United States spanning Friday and Saturday, January 6-7, 2017.

Arctic air will plunge into the Southern states and lay the path for the winter storm.

The storm, which delivered feet of snow over the Sierra Nevada in California early this week, will sweep over the Southwest into Friday.

The storm will then ride along the southern edge of the arctic air in the Southeast.

How strong the storm becomes will affect its ability to throw precipitation into the cold air over the region to end the week.

Georgia Weather

#gawx

@NWSAtlanta

Follow Phillip

on instagram

@majikphil

on facebook

@phillipsnaturalworld

on twitter

@philzcatz

on the web

@phillipsnaturalworld

Stuck at Atlanta's

(Hartsfield-Jackson) Airport?

Here's what you need to know

Delta Air Lines and Southwest Airlines have cancelled hundreds of Atlanta flights as they prepared for the snowstorm expected to hit the area, and that means some passengers are going to be stuck.

Here are some of the things you should know if you’re stuck at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport:

There are plenty of airport hotels around Hartsfield-Jackson, but it’s not unusual for them to run out of rooms when flights get cancelled. Not only are passengers stuck looking for rooms, but Delta also books up hotel rooms to keep its employees close to the airport during storms.

If you need a hotel room and can’t find one in the airport area, you can take MARTA for only $2.50 each way to downtown, Midtown or Buckhead, which also have plenty of hotels.

Hartsfield-Jackson says it will have concessions open 24 hours on every concourse during the storm. They include: IHOP in the atrium, Subway on Concourse T, Boar’s Head on Concourse A, Paschal’s on Concourse B, If you're really desperate there's the Crazy-Christian, bigots-brigade-run Chick-fil-A on Concourse C (we'd recommend avoiding them no matter what), Einstein Bagel on Concourse D, Qdoba on Concourse E and The Varsity of Concourse F.

There are also newsstands open in the terminal and on every concourse, where you can buy a book or magazine to read or toiletries you may need.

MinuteSuites on Concourse B offers several small units for rent. Each has a daybed.

The airport’s ground transportation mall, where the people-mover train runs underground, is a good place to walk through the airport. It has art on view, particularly between Concourses T, A, B and C.

You can also take the SkyTrain to the Gateway Center, where there is a Marriott hotel with a restaurant.

The exact track of the storm would also be a factor and could cause the area of heaviest snow to shift farther to the north or to the south.

Where snow occurs, it will initially melt on the roads. However, as colder air invades during and shortly after the storm, icy conditions can develop in some communities and along some highways.

At this time, the area at greatest risk for some snow, a wintry mix or flash freeze includes the cities of Jackson, Mississippi; Birmingham, Alabama; Chattanooga, Tennessee; Atlanta; Charlotte, Winston-Salem and Raleigh, North Carolina; and Richmond, Virginia.

The realm of possibilities range from a simple change to cold air and dry conditions to snow, ice and dangerous travel over the interior South in areas that typically receive little or no snow during the winter.

In the scenario where a storm forms but fails to become very strong, spotty snow and ice can cause slippery travel around some southern U.S. communities from Friday into Saturday.

Florida Stays Unseasonably Warm

Should the storm develop to its full potential, then several inches of snow and some ice could occur from parts of northern Georgia to upstate South Carolina, central and northern North Carolina, central and southeastern Virginia, lower Maryland and southern Delaware.

In the extreme case, travel and activities could be disrupted for days during and in the wake of the storm in the southern U.S.

Regardless, freezing air is likely to stop short of reaching the immediate Gulf coast, South Texas and the central and southern parts of Florida in the wake of the storm.

We've Read:

What Scientific Term or Concept Should Be More Widely Known?

Considering the "Election" of Donald Trump we should all understand entropy, evolution and the second law of thermodynamics. Disorder is more probable in our ever-evolving world.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics

The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that in an isolated system (one that is not taking in energy), entropy never decreases. (The First Law is that energy is conserved; the Third, that a temperature of absolute zero is unreachable.) Closed systems inexorably become less structured, less organized, less able to accomplish interesting and useful outcomes, until they slide into an equilibrium of gray, tepid, homogeneous monotony and stay there.

In its original formulation the Second Law referred to the process in which usable energy in the form of a difference in temperature between two bodies is dissipated as heat flows from the warmer to the cooler body. Once it was appreciated that heat is not an invisible fluid but the motion of molecules, a more general, statistical version of the Second Law took shape. Now order could be characterized in terms of the set of all microscopically distinct states of a system: Of all these states, the ones that we find useful make up a tiny sliver of the possibilities, while the disorderly or useless states make up the vast majority. It follows that any perturbation of the system, whether it is a random jiggling of its parts or a whack from the outside, will, by the laws of probability, nudge the system toward disorder or uselessness. If you walk away from a sand castle, it won’t be there tomorrow, because as the wind, waves, seagulls, and small children push the grains of sand around, they’re more likely to arrange them into one of the vast number of configurations that don’t look like a castle than into the tiny few that do.

Shit Happens

The Second Law of Thermodynamics is acknowledged in everyday life, in sayings such as “Ashes to ashes,” “Things fall apart,” “Rust never sleeps,” “Shit happens,” You can’t unscramble an egg,” “What can go wrong will go wrong,” and (from the Texas lawmaker Sam Rayburn), “Any jackass can kick down a barn, but it takes a carpenter to build one.”

Scientists appreciate that the Second Law is far more than an explanation for everyday nuisances; it is a foundation of our understanding of the universe and our place in it. In 1915 the physicist Arthur Eddington wrote:

The law that entropy always increases holds, I think, the supreme position among the laws of Nature. If someone points out to you that your pet theory of the universe is in disagreement with Maxwell's equations—then so much the worse for Maxwell's equations. If it is found to be contradicted by observation—well, these experimentalists do bungle things sometimes. But if your theory is found to be against the second law of thermodynamics I can give you no hope; there is nothing for it but to collapse in deepest humiliation.

In his famous 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow commented on the disdain for science among educated Britons in his day:

A good many times I have been present at gatherings of people who, by the standards of the traditional culture, are thought highly educated and who have with considerable gusto been expressing their incredulity at the illiteracy of scientists. Once or twice I have been provoked and have asked the company how many of them could describe the Second Law of Thermodynamics. The response was cold: it was also negative. Yet I was asking something which is the scientific equivalent of: Have you read a work of Shakespeare's?

And the evolutionary psychologists John Tooby, Leda Cosmides, and Clark Barrett entitled a recent paper on the foundations of the science of mind “The Second Law of Thermodynamics is the First Law of Psychology.”

Why the awe for the Second Law? The Second Law defines the ultimate purpose of life, mind, and human striving: to deploy energy and information to fight back the tide of entropy and carve out refuges of beneficial order. An underappreciation of the inherent tendency toward disorder, and a failure to appreciate the precious niches of order we carve out, are a major source of human folly.

To start with, the Second Law implies that misfortune may be no one’s fault. The biggest breakthrough of the scientific revolution was to nullify the intuition that the universe is saturated with purpose: that everything happens for a reason. In this primitive understanding, when bad things happen—accidents, disease, famine—someone or something must have wanted them to happen. This in turn impels people to find a defendant, demon, scapegoat, or witch to punish. Galileo and Newton replaced this cosmic morality play with a clockwork universe in which events are caused by conditions in the present, not goals for the future. The Second Law deepens that discovery: Not only does the universe not care about our desires, but in the natural course of events it will appear to thwart them, because there are so many more ways for things to go wrong than to go right. Houses burn down, ships sink, battles are lost for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Poverty, too, needs no explanation. In a world governed by entropy and evolution, it is the default state of humankind. Matter does not just arrange itself into shelter or clothing, and living things do everything they can not to become our food. What needs to be explained is wealth. Yet most discussions of poverty consist of arguments about whom to blame for it.

More generally, an underappreciation of the Second Law lures people into seeing every unsolved social problem as a sign that their country is being driven off a cliff. It’s in the very nature of the universe that life has problems. But it’s better to figure out how to solve them—to apply information and energy to expand our refuge of beneficial order—than to start a conflagration and hope for the best.

We're Following: