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Brian's dad has been a weather observer for 45 years. Weather is a big deal in the farming business. Paying attention to the weather is in our blood. Here is a semi-reliable page giving current conditions: Loma Weather. The web cam is pointed in our direction, a river valley between the near and far hills. If you look closely, you can see a speck that is our house in the upper right corner - or is it our nephew's house? Another weather station is in Fort Benton, where Laura and Brian work, ten miles away.
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Looking west, forest fire smoke meets clear air at our home August 14, 2007. Only to the south was there blue sky.
A forest fire in southern Montana is photographed by the Space Shuttle crew on August 13, 2007
A NASA satellite photo of Montana and Idaho forest fires on August 17, 2007
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We live on the windy semi-arid Northern Great Plains. Our average rainfall is 12.5 inches. Half of that is received in the growing season of April through June. We have extremes in temperature here, holding the national record for the widest temperature variation in a twenty-four hour period. On January 14, 1972 the temperature rose from -54deg.F to +50deg. F overnight, a 104 degree change. It was one of those days that people remember what they were doing when... Even on August 30, 2007 it was 40deg.F at 6:00am and by the middle of the afternoon it got to 100. The hottest temperature recorded was on July 29, 1962 when it reached 111deg. F. The coldest temperature was on December 23, 1968. It got down to -56deg. F. Snow doesn't stay all winter like in the states east of Montana. Above freezing Chinook winds warm this area up periodically and melt the snow, leaving the landscape brown. It was a Chinook that caused the temperature variation record in 1972. There is even a town eighty miles away called Chinook where Laura spent some of her high school years.
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