USDA declares Disaster Designation for Suffolk due to shellfish die-off; New pavilion at Cupsogue opens Friday; and more East End news

Here’s a question everyone around here has been asking the past couple days…Are weekends rainier than the work week?If the question sounds preposterous, consider this spring: Including the sodden Memorial Day weekend we just experienced, it rained five of the last six weekends.Nicholas Spangler and Anastasia Valeeva report in NEWSDAY that it rained on half, or 10, of 20 weekend days since the start of the season on March 20. By comparison, it rained on a mere one-third of the 46 workweek days.Was this uneven distribution a function of chance? A cosmic conspiracy to ruin your golf game? Is there a scientific explanation?"Really, this is not much more than a bit of a bad luck pattern," said Newsday meteorologist Geoff Bansen. "Look at the global jet stream," the bands of strong wind that generally blow from west to east all across the globe, affecting temperature and precipitation, he said. "The movement is very rhythmic, but no one bats an eye when these things happen during the week."Finding a pattern to weekend rainfall, he added, would likely require sifting decades of climate data, not just a season’s worth.A Newsday analysis of decades of precipitation data collected by the National Weather Service in Islip suggested Bansen was correct: Analyses of five, 10 and 40 years of data found rain was not more frequent on weekends than weekdays. It also found no statistically significant change in the overall occurrence of rain events. The analysis did find that, over the last five years, Thursday was the rainiest day, followed by Saturday.A number of academic studies have analyzed historical precipitation data from other regions in search of weekly weather cycles, or what is sometimes called a "weekend effect." One hypothesis is that human activity that releases aerosols — tiny particles from smoke, dust or other sources that float in the atmosphere — could have meteorological impacts including on precipitation occurrence and amounts. Since that activity tends to increase during the week and decrease during the weekend, the thinking goes, it might be possible to discern cyclical variance.But the results of these studies are mixed. A 2008 paper found that "both the average area and intensity" of rain events over the southeast United States were greater in the middle of the week than on weekends; the phenomenon was reversed over the Atlantic.***A forgotten baseball stadium that once drew thousands of fans — and one of the greatest pitchers in baseball history — has become the spark for a new community-driven effort to preserve Riverhead’s overlooked stories.Denise Civiletti reports on Riverheadlocal.com that Riverhead Free Library librarians Joann White and Michael Ryan say the idea for the library’s new “Riverhead Remembers” local history project grew out of their astonishment upon learning that Satchel Paige once pitched at a long-vanished Riverhead venue called Wivchar Stadium, later known as Riverhead Stadium.Neither librarian had ever heard of the stadium.Then they discovered many longtime Riverhead residents had not heard of it either.That realization led to a larger question: What else has Riverhead forgotten?Now the library is asking residents to help answer it — by bringing in photographs, documents, personal correspondence and stories tied to life in Riverhead through the decades. The library will digitize all materials and return originals to their owners, while building a growing archive of community history.“We really want to know their story,” White said. “A picture is great, but we need to learn a little bit about the story in the background.”The effort is centered partly around the mystery of Wivchar Stadium itself — a short-lived sports venue that operated from roughly 1949 to 1951 near what is now the Pulaski Street sports complex and the Riverhead Central School District offices on Osborn Avenue.Despite hosting professional-style events and drawing crowds reportedly exceeding 6,000 people, almost no photographic evidence of the stadium has surfaced.The legendary Satchel Paige appeared there in a barnstorming game on July 21, 1950.That game inspired the Suffolk County Sports Hall of Fame to install a historical marker at the site in 2022.The Riverhead librarians say they are especially interested in stories that often go undocumented — including African American history, immigrant experiences and everyday community life.For more information or to submit something for the Riverhead Remembers project, email [email protected].***Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) located on the north shore of Long Island at the Nassau / Suffolk border since 1890…congratulates their Professor David Jackson, who has been elected to the Fellowship of the Royal Society.Having the letters FRS (Fellow of the Royal Society) tacked onto the end of one’s name is among the very highest honors a scientist can achieve. It’s a mark of elite distinction. Other Fellows of the Royal Society include Isaac Newton, Benjamin Franklin, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Stephen Hawking.“David Jackson has been a cornerstone of CSHL’s historic plant biology program since he joined the faculty in 1997,” said CSHL President Bruce Stillman. “His research has advanced science’s understanding of plant stem cell regulation, with significant implications for crop yield and other traits of agricultural importance. I congratulate Professor Jackson on his well-deserved election to the Royal Society.”Jackson came to CSHL after completing a fellowship funded by NATO and the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Among his most recent discoveries are specific stem cell regulators in maize, which Jackson’s lab linked to corn ear size and productivity.For 136 years, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory has shaped contemporary biomedical research and education with programs in cancer, neuroscience, plant biology and quantitative biology. Home to eight Nobel Prize winners, the private, not-for-profit Laboratory employs 1,000 people including 600 scientists, students and technicians. The Meetings & Courses Program hosts more than 12,000 scientists from around the world each year on its campuses in Long Island and in Suzhou, China. The Laboratory’s education arm also includes an academic publishing house, a graduate school and programs for middle, high school, and undergraduate students and teachers.***The gaseous power duo that is heating up the planet consists of carbon dioxide, which is the largest contributor to global warming, and methane, its fast-acting, hot-tempered sibling.Hilary Howard reports in THE NY TIMES that carbon dioxide, which is mostly the result of burning fossil fuels, tends to get top-villain billing in climate policies. But in New York, methane — the stuff of cow burps, pipeline leaks and landfills — is getting its moment in the spotlight as legislators consider changing a metric for measuring greenhouse gases. It is part of an overhaul of the state’s 2019 climate law that New York Gov. Kathy Hochul has proposed.The suggested metric, a common — and some say outdated — formula for counting emissions since the early 1990s, would play a crucial role in weakening what was once described as one of the most ambitious climate laws in the world. It would downplay the warming effects of methane, many scientists argue.Methane can trap 80 times more heat than carbon dioxide over a 20-year period. So New York’s current climate law uses a metric that reflects this fact.Unlike carbon dioxide, which can linger in the atmosphere for hundreds of years, methane disappears fast; half of its presence is gone after 12 years. This means its heat-trapping effects diminish over time — which is why, many scientists said, it’s important to measure its effects at shorter intervals. Over 100 years, for example, methane’s heat-trapping powers are reduced to being about 30 times more potent than carbon dioxide’s.Now, Ms. Hochul wants to adopt a 100-year time frame to measure the effect of methane on the climate. That would be a significant shift from the current policy, which evaluates methane’s impact over 20 years. Doing that would dilute measurements of the planet-warming damage of methane, scientists argue.But it would also keep costs down by putting less pressure on waste management facilities, farmers and natural gas companies to reduce their methane pollution, an expensive undertaking that other New Yorkers could end up subsidizing through higher bills and prices, Ms. Hochul’s office argues.Governor Hochul, a Democrat, is up for re-election this year and is embracing an affordability platform. She seems more amenable to New York trading in its trailblazing climate leader status for what other states are doing. Ms. Hochul has the support of some moderate members of her party, along with unions and business organizations.***United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement this year has detained at least a dozen young people locally with a special immigration status that protected them from deportation. The men, all of whom are from Central American countries, were released after challenging their detentions in court. The agency last year deported 132 people nationally with this status. Special Immigrant Juvenile Status applications have exploded in recent years. Roughly 78,000 people under the age of 21 applied nationally during the last fiscal year, up from 11,500 in 2015.Josefa Velásquez reports in NEWSDAY that across Long Island, young immigrants who came to this country years ago as children or teens — and believed the status would...