2017 Autumn Photo Thread (NH)

The sun came out, and it was a little prettier.


Man, if there's something my phone camera doesn't do, it's color. Not when I shoot Raw. It's good with yellows, but definitely not greens or blues. Somehow it does do color in jpg, just not in Raw...

That looks pretty heavy, if it is indeed continuing through the night.

This is a lot of snow for being October. The coastal suburbs of Umeå don't have snow on the ground though, and I'l be checking live cams to see when it melts in Umeå

This is what it looked like in the morning and it also snowed for a while during the day. Seems to be around 5-10 cm, not bad for first snow. It's such a nice morale boost even if walking around in regular shoes is a pain.

As I mentioned some days ago in this other thread, in these days we are having some troubles because of several fires burning the woods along the northern side of our valley. 

www.thelocal.it/20171027/piedmont-firefighters-struggling-as-wildfires-reach-edges-of-turin

This time I have some pictures I took by myself, so I though to post them in here. Anyway, for explaining a little bit the situation I also want to show you a couple of pictures of my region from a satellite. 

This is from the beginning of the last week:

My place is just west of the point of the red arrow. You can notice that on the French side of the Alps there were a lot of clouds, while our side was interested by foehn wind effect (thus dry and warm winds), which alimented the first fires. These fires spread quickly because it is really dry (my region in this period of the year is usually much more green that than), and the smoke was soon visible also from the satellite. 

During the following days the wind stopped and a stable high pressure condition settled. In these conditions the fires propagation slowed down, but the smoke remained trapped in the little space of the valleys and the close areas of the plains (like Turin). 
From the satellite:

^ my valley in here is completely white
This is when I took my  first pictures:
this is from the bottom of the valley


^ all the bottom of the valley looked like that because of the accumulated smoke, regardless from the distance from the closest fire. The smoke also reached Turin, where yesterday the value of PM10 hit 199 µg/m³, corresponding to 4 times the european law limit. 

Yesterday we also made a couple of pictures from above the smoke layer, at about 1500 m of altitude:





while this one is from a village at 800 m of altitude:




Today the weather is more similar to the beginning of the week, so we are having strong foehn wind again:

This on the one hand cleared the air from all that smoke, but on the other hand alimented again the fires which are quickly propagating once again.
Here there are the pictures from today:


^mostly clear air, apart from the smoke from the still active fire.

the problem is that the active fire has a front of about 15 Km, 1200 hectares were burnt and it is getting really close to some inhabited areas (my pictures are really bad because I made them on the car when returning back home and it was already quite dark outside. Anyway, the place where I took the first picture is more or less 10 Km away from the place of the last picture, and several large fire lines were visible all along)









So that my pictures are awful, here there is also a video made today in the same area:


In summary, the situation in here is really worrisome. The fires are going on since last Sunday, and cannot stop until it is so windy because firefighters can't use helicopters & co and because it propagates to quickly. On the other hand, the absence of wind cause the accumulation of smoke all over the valley covering it as a thick fog would do (but with much worse effects on health). The only solution would be some rain, but we haven't had any precipitation for more than 2 months and no change is forecast in this sense. In addition, the number of vehicles and men sent for resolving the situation is ridiculously low, and the most of work is made by volunteers who (nearly) didn't sleep for nearly one week. I'm really worried for the next few days in particular, according to the forecast the strong wind will last at least until Monday and in this condition the fire evolution is nearly unpredictable. 

My village should be ok, the fire should not be able to cross the valley and reach our side (there is also a little river in the middle and a lot of space with really scarse flammable vegetation), but I'm still worried and frustrated for this situation. 

Nice crisp sky. Temp was 49F (9C) around 11 AM. DP of 33F (1C).

nice weather. 6C and clear skies.



"götönvaara"



nice views from up there.

I'll do the same.