Hi, I’m Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. A huge ice storm hit Virginia’s Shenandoah National Park this past winter. One of the things that the resulting damaged trees showed Weather Notebook producer James Jones this past summer is that the life of a tree is not as simple as it looks.

Jim: "When hiking through a dense stand of majestic old trees, it’s easy to be tricked into thinking that the forest is eternal -- or at least changing very slowly, at it’s own pace.

But after an ice storm like the one that hit the park last winter, we can see that the forest’s life isn’t as laid-back as it seems. The storm knocked down 70-year-old trees, and carved out big new openings in the forest. Tree tops and limbs are still falling with every summer thunderstorm.

Tom Blount, a research ecologist at the park says the storm and its aftermath teach us that a normal life for a forest really isn’t very predictable at all."

Tom: "What you recognize is that normal ecological models of succession that occur in regular controlled patterns that might be based on some sort of natural sequence -- it doesn’t always work that way in nature, because nature is often driven by events and by catastrophes, whether its large wildfires, large events such as storms, floods, ice storms, etc. And so what you have is a whole series of patchwork events that actually come together to make the whole."

Jim: "In some ways, the storm will bring the park closer to it’s natural state, turning a forest of uniform age that emerged from farm fields over the last 70 years, into a more diverse area -- one that is closer to what it would have been had man never lived there."

Jim Jones is a producer from Washington DC. For pictures of this ice storm in the Shenandoahs, please visit our website at weathernotebook.org. Thanks today to Subaru and to the National Science Foundation.