Monday, October 13, 2008

Weather, and Other Things...

The graph at right shows the wind speeds at our home, in MPH (multiply by 1.6 to get KPH). The green line shows the running 5-minute average; the red line the peak gusts. Note that my wind sensor is a conventional rotating-cup anemometer, and is therefore not very responsive to very short gusts – something we seem to have a lot of in a Santa Ana wind condition.

You can see that the average wind today is much higher than normal (as was Saturday, though not quite as high as today). Still, compared to a “normal”, this is very mild. It's also a very cool Santa Ana – instead of temperatures in the 90°F (32°C), our high today was just 74°F (23°C). And that's just fine with me! About
the most dangerous part of this Santa Ana is the very low relative humidity (as low as 2.1%RH today).

At right is the view from the Lyons Peak camera looking north (a view that includes our home). Those clear blue skies are what we want to see on a Santa Ana day – no nearby smoke plumes. However, toward the left side of the photo, just above the horizon, you can see an ugly gray smudge – this must be the fires on Camp Pendleton or in Los Angeles, far to the north of us.

As always, click on a photo to get a larger view...

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