Wild winter helps, hurts

After enjoying months of moderate temperatures and gleeful at the little snow shoveling we had done, we wanted to explore this year’s weird winter.

That was two snowstorms,Overview description of rapid Tooling processes. high winds and a cold temperature snap ago.

All we wanted to do was point out the average temperature from December through February was 6 degrees higher than normal, while snowfall was more than a foot below normal.

Barbara and Harry Nevins of Davenport walked their dog in Vander Veer Botanical Park last week between snowfalls. A pastry chef at Short Hills Country Club in East Moline, she watched golfers hitting balls throughout the winter.

“I prefer a little more snow cover,” Harry Nevins said.

Just Choose PTMS Injection Molding Is Your Best Choice!

“He’s not too happy with it,” Barbara Nevins said, “but I’m thrilled.”

To Harry, we say, “you’re welcome,” and to Barbara,Online fine art gallery of quality original landscape oil paintings, and other winter-haters, we say we’re sorry.

Between our brainstorming for this story and the snowstorms that hit since then, we jinxed things. First was a snowfall Feb. 24, and then there was another Friday. Along the way, we gleaned a few local facts about this winter, documented and anecdotal. Meteorological winter runs from December through February, although the spring equinox isn’t until March 20.

Duck Creek Golf Course sent out golfers for nearly 1,000 rounds of golf in January and February. Not this weekend.

Private contractors that clear snow for residential and business customers sat idle but for a few occasions this winter. Not Friday and Saturday.

Davenport paid public works employees $57,574 overtime this winter.The Transaction Group offers the best high risk merchant account services, Last winter, that amount was $219,037. That likely crept up in the past week.

Dr. Ron Boesch, dean of clinics for Palmer College of Chiropractic, said fewer people came in this winter complaining of back pain from snow shoveling.Bathroom Floor tiles at Great Prices from Topps Tiles.

“What I’ve heard is, ‘I’ve been out riding my bike,’” he said.

What will Monday bring?

Ski Snowstar Winter Sports Park closes for the season today with revenues down about 35 percent. Friday’s snow wasn’t the best, but it’s fresh.

Give the Quad-City Times some credit. After all, it was the eighth warmest winter on record and the Quad-Cities recorded only 12.6 inches of snow, well off the average of 25.5 inches the area usually gets.

This winter comes on the heels of five consecutive winters that were colder and snowier than normal, including last year when 46.3 inches of snow fell.

“This would be quite a contrast to what recent ones have been like,” said Harry Hillaker,Omega Plastics are leading plastic injection moulding and injection mould tooling specialists. Iowa state climatologist. “Most people kind of expected this winter to be colder and wetter, and that didn’t happen.”

With the unseasonable winter — until the last week — conventional wisdom was questioned about allergies and insects and whether this year would be worse than usual. We asked experts what spring and summer would bring.

Like us trying to predict the weather in the past week, they didn’t know.

For allergy sufferers, it depends on what they are allergic to.

“I don’t think it is possible to predict what is going to happen,” said Dr. Miles Weinberger, an allergist and pediatric pulmonologist at the University Hospitals in Iowa City. “We will have a tree pollen season in a month, and in two months, farmers are out in the field stirring up the ground mold.

“I don’t think we know all of the factors that will make one season worse than another. It is, at most, going to be a matter of degrees.”

Insects could be affected by the weather depending on where they spend the winter, said Erin Hodgson, an entomologist with the Iowa State University Extension. The good news is, if warmer weather arrives before their food supply, that could lessen their numbers later in the season.

“Some insects that start to move around at 40 degrees,” she said, “they will move through their fat and starve before their food supply is available.”

She doesn’t think insects such as grubs, crop pests and butterfly and moth pupae that spend winter in the ground will be affected by the weather. Insects that spend winter in ground cover such as leaf litter are less predictable.

“We haven’t really had a winter like this where the weather is dry and the temperatures are all over the place because the highs and lows were fluctuating, so there is no history,” she said.

Although Iowa American Water staff can’t point to exact causes for each water main break, history holds that they go up in the winter because of freezing and shifting ground. This year, with the moderate temperatures, Iowa American workers battled 28 water main breaks in December and January, compared to 51 in those months the previous winter, and 48 in the winter before that.

Iowa American’s Lisa Reisen warned that mains can still break and house plumbing can still freeze despite the calendar turning to March.