The Weather Notebook: A Listener Sundog Story

A Listener Sundog Story
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Dave Thurlow, Host

Hi, I'm Dave Thurlow from the Mount Washington Observatory and this is The Weather Notebook. Today on the show, we have a childhood weather memory from Edward Carr from Westbrook, ME, who listens to Maine Public Radio:

South Pole Station, Antarctica January 1979 Photo: Commander John Bortniak, NOAA Corps
"I'll never forget when we had our house back in central New York redone at one point and a workman brought my mother to the window and he pointed out and he said 'you see that...that's a sundog' and the sun had a weird white ring around the outside of it. And after that he said 'now I'm going out, I'm going to feed your birds and then I'm going home and you probably won't see me for awhile.'

Does this mean that the guy was taking a vacation, quiting, he had another job? Or did he know something about these sundog things. Let's see.

"He went out, and he fed the birds, he went home. My dad got home, backed the truck into the garage after putting the plow on it, came inside."

Now his dad must have seen the sundogs too, or at least he had heard a weather report. So, what happened after that?

"We were stuck on our hillside for a week. That was the blizzard of 1966."

Sundogs don't always foretell blizzards, but they are a good indication of some kind of precipitation within 24 hours, winter or summer. Sundogs are part of a large ring of ice crystal clouds that appear to circle the sun. If you looked at the ring around the sun as a clock, at about 3 and 9 o'clock, you'd see sundogs. They look like a little chunk of rainbow. They form when sunlight strikes high clouds that are the first part of a storm approaching from the west. And that's why the workman knew snow was on the way.

For a picture of a sundog, visit our website at mountwashington.org. Thanks to Subaru and the National Science Foundation.