Proud to announce that our Cold United group on Flickr is becoming popular! We’ve got 684 members and 8,899 cold winter photographs. Cool! Feel free to join us.

Meanwhile, enjoy Cold United members’ pretty chilly portraits. All pics are clickable.

Flagstaff Eskimo. By Shanks, Flickr.

29 Eric Lon at Stok Kangri, October 2011. By Eric Lon, Flickr.

Snow heart in Yakutia, Siberia. By Egor Fedorov, Flickr.

Two sisters in the fish market in Yakutsk, Yakutia, Siberia. By Bernard Grua, Flickr.

Standing on a frozen lake. By LiamCH, Flickr.

With All Of My Heart. By John M. Kennedy, Flickr.

By Jessica Joy Photography, Flickr.

Indeed, winter has already started. For instance, my city of Yakutsk has -24C right now. Not extremely yet, but it’s good time to shart sharing the cold and its beauty

Snow Picnic Table… Taking from the window in the back of the house

Cold United runs the group of the same name on Flickr. Its URL address is http://www.flickr.com/groups/coldunited/. Join and enjoy cold photographs. They are beautiful.

Currently, we’ve got 8122 items from 647 photographers! Last pics of the pool are reflected here in the widget on the right sidebar. Great, isn’t it?!

Hereby we start presenting our faithful contributors… Today, please, welcome Stella Blu. She is a great photographer… and she is a Canadian!

Take a look at her splendid winter photographs. Captions provided by the author.

Evening Sun in the Winter

Icefloats on the North Saskatchewan River

Riding his bike in the winter… This was a very cold cold winter afternoon. Not my idea of fun riding a bike. I nearly froze already walking to the bridge.

View of the Glacier… Lake Louise

Canadian Rockies… Lake Luoise

Chateau Lake Louise…

He’s checking me out… Perhaps he does not like to have his photo taken Elk Island National Park

What if they had a race just for nice guys? They can’t all be last, can they?.. Ducks in a hurry to reach the ice first Today I saw lots of Mallard Ducks on the North Saskatchewan River. They stay here for the winter. Mostly at the warm water outflow from the Goldbar water treatment plant.

Low Flying Aircraft Sign… Cooking Lake Airport

Ready for take off… Cooking Lake Airport

Kangwondo Gazebo Edmonton…

See more Stella Blu’s cold photographs on the Cold United flickr stream. Check also her personal photostream.

The Sapporo Snow Festival (or Yuki Matsuri) is held every year in Sapporo, the capital of the Hokkaido Prefecture, Japan.

Photos from clairelynn, brianfarrell and adam.fenrick‘s Flickr photostreams.

Jumping for joy on the Central Park mall. By Rob Littlefield.

St. Pat's in the snow. By Whitney Hoover.

Here are pictures of last night’s snowstorm in New York City. It seems snowy weather in NYC is not already abnormal. They are more like two brothers, who would love to stay far from each other, but together look great!

The Brooklyn Bridge in the snow. By Amazin Jane from flickr.

Walking in Tompkins Square Park. By Vivienne Gucwa from Flickr.

Snowed in train playground on 45th. By a GOTHAMist reader.

See the entire collection of last night’s NYC area photos at Gothamist.com.

What do you know about snow? The first words that come to my Siberian mind, certainly, are white, cold, wet, and, maybe, clean. Actually, it’s a part of our daily winter life and surrounding. We got used to see it, and we think nothing about snow could amuse us, but that way of thinking appears to be self-delusion. Snow is wonderful and the following facts got me resume my interest in it.

Did you know that…

1. Snow forms if the freezing level is below a height of 300 m (1,000 feet) above the ground and the ice crystals do not have time to melt before they reach the surface.

2. The terminal velocity of a snowflake is 5 km/h (3.1 miles per hour) and its fall times from a height of 3,000 m (10,000 feet) is 36 minutes. A small hailstone reach the ground for 4.5 minutes at speed of 39 km/h (24 miles per hour).

3. The shape that an ice crystal takes is determined by the temperature at which it forms and, to a lesser extent, the humidity level in the air. Higher humidity, above water saturation, leads to more branched growth on the crystals.

4. Snowflakes take many different forms but all are variations of a basic hexagonal crystal shape. There are, for example, the following shapes: stellar dendrite, fern-like dendrite, thin plate, needles, solid plate, hollow column, column, prism, capped column, stellar plate, bullet rosette.

5. Wilson A. Bentley, a farmer from Vermont, U.S.A., took the first detailed photograph of a snowflake, in 1885, and would take thousands more over his lifetime. His book Snow Crystals has become a classic and the phrase “no two snowflakes are alike” can be credited to him.

6. Sapporo, Japan’s fifth-largest city, on the island of Hokkaido, is the snowiest metropolis in the world. Its annual average snowfall is 630 cm (248 inches). Each February over two million people attend the Sapporo Snow Festival to admire hundreds of snow and ice sculptures.

7. Snow is a good insulator, so it can be quite warm inside an Inuit igloo made out of snow. Stoves can cause the blocks to melt a little, but the moisture freezes overnight. The traditional Inuit igloo is built from blocks of hard, wind-compacted snow.

8. Snow reflects most of the light and heat from the Sun. Snow chills air near the surface during the day. At night, snow radiates energy at infrared wavelengths and more heat is lost. On a clear night, the loss of energy from snow-covered ground further chills the air. Under clear skies, radiated heat from snow and the ground is not trapped by clouds, so it escapes to space, thereby cooling the snow. Cold snow also cools the air layer above the surface.

9. Snow is home to polar bears. They are born in a den under the snow in spring and when strong enough, they emerge with their mother to learn how to catch food for themselves.

10. Fresh water from melting ice shelves threatens to dilute salty seawater, which, in turn, may alter ocean currents and global weather. In addition, a reduction in snow cover will decrease reflected solar energy, leading to more global warming and reduced snowfall.

This list might be continued.
Do you know more amusing facts about snow?

PS. Facts via The Encyclopedia of Weather and Climate Change: A Complete Visual Guide.

Dutch

Greenland

Photo: Ronald Menti -  Flickr Source

Bolot, what is the weather like  in Yakutsk?

Susan, what is the weather like  in Canada?

Karl, what is the weather like  in Sweden?

amazingsnow, what is the weather like  in Spain?

Everybody, what is the weather like ?

… see more in Flickr

Nationaal Archief / Het Leven / Spaarnestad Photo, SFA022003048

‘Ski-sailing’, a new sport invented in Austria, demonstrated in St. Moritz, Switzerland, January 1938.