Slope aspect and cold-air drainage create sharply different microclimates within yards

Evidence

Our ranch house is on a south-facing slope, well touched by the sun in both winter and summer. So even our winters are comparatively balmy, with the frost rarely reaching below the outer skin of the ground, or an inch or so at most. But hardly a quarter of a mile up in the hills behind us stands another house that lies at the beginning of a dark canyon. In the winter the chill of the canyon comes down to that house and icy fingers of winter may reach even a foot underground, freezing the pipes of the people and cutting off their water supply for days. Thus are two very different microclimates (miniature climates) found within only a few hundred yards of each other! — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods, 123

Categorization

• DEFINE: Parenthetically defines microclimate as miniature climate in the course of a concrete, memorable example.
• XREF: Maps onto the course’s disturbance-reading lens: aspect and cold-air pooling explain why two Minnesota hillsides a few hundred yards apart support different species. — connects to: Ring width records year-to-year moisture and reveals cyclic drought patterns. — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods: Seeing More in…, 119; Plant communities define distinct climatic life zones across latituderable and elevation gradients. — Vinson Brown, Reading the Woods: Seeing More in…, 102; Microclimate inside a forest gap depends on gap diameter relative to tree height. — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 164 (+4 more)

Broader Connections

• Microclimate inside a forest gap depends on gap diameter relative to tree height. #qualifies (0.95) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 164
• Topography-driven wind patterns skew treefall frequency and thus species abundance locally #qualifies (0.95) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 472
• Snow grounds require a layered porous-medium impedance model. #qualifies (0.95) — Donald G. Albert and John A. Orcutt, Acoustic Pulse Propagation Above…, 26
• Each degradation aspect traces to specific physical mechanisms in habitat #qualifies (0.95) — Almo Farina, Soundscape Ecology, 663
• In leafless spring forests light and moisture change little between gap and canopy #contradicts (0.85) — S. T. A. Pickett and P. S. White, eds., The Ecology of Natural Disturbance and…, 1442