How to Make Your Own White Christmas

Forget about dreaming of a white Christmas, just like the ones you used to know. Statistically speaking many of us will not have a white Christmas this year.

As of yesterday, here is the current snow cover for the US along with the the statistical probability in percent that a snow depth of at least 1 inch will be observed on December 25th (Thanks to the National Climatic Data Center).

So, can you ignore mother nature and just make your own snow? No, mother nature still needs to give you a couple things from her kitchen: good ambient temperature and good humidity. Temperature is a given, but humidity? In late summer in the sticky south, one knows you can't seem to sweat enough. This sticky principle is the same for snow. When there is high humidity in the air, water in the air can not evaporate to remove some of its heat. Heat is the enemy of snow (the Frosty the Snowman principle).

Check on this online snowmaking weather chart to see if the conditions are right to make snow in your part of the world. Apparently, I missed out on 12 great snow making days last year here in Clemson.

Some snow-making tools of envy include:

• For the Suburban Snowmaker: The SG6 X-Stream™ Complete Snow Making Package contains everything you need, and everything you want when making snow including an SG6 X-Stream™ snow maker, a 1.75gpm Electric Pressure Washer, and a 5.5cfm Campbell Hausfeld Air Compressor. Cost is $1,248.

• For the Unlimited Budget: YORK Neige makes a new generation snow sprayer called the Safyr (Sapphire). The Safyr touts itself as a low energy, high volume snow producer and claims to achieve huge flows in the range of 220 gallons per minute. The Safyr can even adjust the size of the water droplets. Bigger droplets mean less drift, reduced evaporative loss, and increased volume. All you need to go with this is a water source and a really big pump.

• Spike the Punch: Still can't get the snow size you need? Why not add a little juice to your snow making water? Snomax, produced by York Snow, allows easier snow making at warmer temperatures. Snomax is an ice nucleating protein from the naturally occurring bacterium (Pseudomium syringae, strain 31 -A to be exact ). After fermentation, the bacterium is pelletized, freeze-dried to reduce water content, and irradiated to kill the bacterium. The protein produced by the bacterium is Snomax.

TVA Fly Ash Spill One Year After

The failure was not instantaneous, but "a progressive sequence of ruptures over a period of approximately one hour." The rupture released the 5.4 million cubic yards of fly ash and dike material on December 22, 2008 into the Emory River.

So what has happened this year. Amazingly, an army of 400-500 workers have removed two-thirds of the spill material from the river and are overall halfway through the $1-billion cleanup. However, the removal of all material may not be completed until 2013.




Pretty dramatic aerial footage comparing last year to this past December. View it Here.

As a result of the spill, EPA will be issuing new regulations for handling coal-ash waste nationwide. TVA will be eliminating all wet ash and gypsum storage from its facilities. Learn how they are removing the fly ash from the river.