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On the Tallinn-Pärnu highway at Jõgisoo a wide strip around the road was snow-free on Friday a week ago

 

For the melting of the snow that stayed for so long this year the sun has been important. The weather in late winter, with a few degrees of warmth in daytime and dry air did not let the snow in shadows to begin to melt. Due to the cooling effect of evaporation there were some degrees of cold on the surface of that snow even during daytime. But in the sun the snow slowly melted – so that at the arrival of spring warmth the ground was bare at the warmer edges of woods and the lark found landing space.

 

The arrival of spring however was different for train and for bus travellers. For train travellers there was still white snow outside the windows on the previous weekend, while there had been a widening snow-free strip of ground on the fields along roads already for a week. There the muddy meltwater dispersed by cars forced the snow to melt. Dark, and falling on the snow around the roads, it started to catch the heat of the sun and so melted snow as far as almost a hundred meters away from the road.

 

A couple of decades ago such an accelerated melting of snow could still be seen around Kunda. At that time so much fly ash was expelled from the cement factory chimneys that within a few days the snow could turn dark gray within a radius of several kilometres, and a clearly gray film accumulated on the snow even 10-15 kilometres from the factory. Thus snow in that area could be gone one or two weeks earlier in some years.