This past week is designated as Climate Preparedness Week. Many organizations across the country host informative or practical events to better understand weather or to prepare for emergencies. Our big event each year is the New Ulm Emergency Preparedness Fair held, for the past two years, in conjunction with the city’s National Night Out festivities. I would like to extend my gratitude to all of our community partners who make the emergency preparedness fair a success. Truly, when we work together we can achieve so much more.

For centuries, the go-to topic of polite, banal conversation has been the weather. In the famous musical, My Fair Lady, Eliza is taught the King’s English using alliterative sentences about the weather. Here in Minnesota (and other places too!) we have the saying that if you don’t like the weather, wait a minute, it will change. As long as people have been observing the world around us, we have noticed patterns in the weather and the changing of the seasons. We like to make sense of things, but weather is fickle! It’s often joked that meteorology is the only scientific discipline where you can be wrong half the time and still keep your job. It just goes to show how complex weather can be. Even with our advanced computers and sensors, we cannot include all possible factors in a prediction model. Temperature, air pressure, humidity, and the speed and direction of the wind are the basics, but weather is affected by solar activity, the earth’s orbit, time of day, particulates in the atmosphere, the presence or absence of vegetation on the ground, the shape of the land, and many other factors. Every year, new scientific observations just increase our understanding of how much we don’t know about the amazingly complex systems on our planet.

Weather patterns over time in a particular place is what constitutes climate. The climate of each area on the surface of the earth is unique in some way. The rainy season in the Amazon is made possible by sand particles carried on the trade winds all the way from the Sahara Desert in northern Africa across the Atlantic Ocean. The mountainous west cost of British Columbia is dotted with temperate rainforests full of tall conifer trees. The mild temperatures in France are made possible by the North Atlantic Current even though it has roughly the same latitude as Minnesota. The unique shape and placement of Lake Maracaibo in Venezuela gives rise to the greatest lightning display in the world. Forests, prairies, swamps, jungles, deserts, mountains, tundra, and more each have their own fascinating weather shaped by where they are located around the globe.

Our weather here in this corner of Minnesota has its challenges too. Intense heat, strong storms, flooding, high winds, freezing cold, and mounds of snow all make the rounds in our neighborhood. As summer shifts into fall, make sure you and your family take time to review your preparations for our next exciting season. Last winter was pretty lackluster, but knowing Minnesota and Old Man Winter, we’ll be in for a surprise when we least expect it. If you need help in figuring out how to prepare for weather emergencies, the library has great resources on emergency preparedness planning and weatherizing your home or garden. We can also connect you to a multitude of online resources ranging from activities for kids to applications for financial assistance with home upgrades. We hope you enjoy the crisp air, fall colors, and harvest festivities in our area, and be sure to stop into the library to enjoy a good book or something more.

The library is located at 17 N. Broadway and is open to the public Monday-Thursday 9:30 a.m.-8 p.m. and Friday-Saturday 9:30 a.m.-5 p.m.