OpenWeatherMap...

It's a new one to me.  Looks interesting...

Thunderstorm Over Montana...

Via APOD:

Snow...Not...

The NOAA forecast for last night (as of the time we went to bed) included 1 to 3 inches of snow at our altitude.  Never happened.  However, we did get close to an inch of rain (about 0.87 inches, to be precise) and a bit of corn kernel sized hail. 

The latter let to an amusing incident on our morning dog walk, which was just at daybreak, during a lull in the rain.  I took all four dogs out on leashes, and is their want in such situations we arrived at a point where two of the dogs (Mo'i and Racer) were synchro-pooping.  There they were, in that awkward-looking dog squat, when suddenly the heavens started dropping that corn kernel sized hail on us.  I had my Aussie bush hat on, so it didn't bother me.  Mo'i never noticed it (this is quite typical of the placid Mr. Mo'i).  But Racer – he was annoyed.  The hail was bouncing off his nose in a way that he didn't appreciate at all, and given his, er, activity he couldn't very well duck his head to avoid it.  So he voiced his displeasure with a few growls, and then started snapping at the descending hail.  He's a very fast dog, so he may well have caught a view hailstones :)

Weather...

My readers on the East Coast or in colder regions of the world should feel perfectly free to laugh at us.  But...we're having a rare episode of frozen precipitation here.  Not snow, but hail – lots and lots of slushy hail, about the size of corn kernels.  Overnight we have a few places where this mixture has accumulated to over an inch (2 cm) deep.  The ground is not frozen, and the air temperature never reached freezing, so these accumulations are all on objects that provide good insulation from the ground (some photos later).

Meanwhile, we also got three quarters of an inch (about 1.5 cm) of rain.  After a parched January we're under average rainfall for the season, so every little bit of additional precipitation is quite welcome.

Debbie and I are headed off to our local mountains for some sight-seeing later.  I'm bringing my camera, so if we see anything interesting there will be photos!

Rain!

Between Friday and Saturday, we've had just over an inch of rain.  My new weather station software graphs rainfall rates, rather than cumulative precipitation – an interesting difference that I'm still getting used to.  The peak rate in this storm was about 15 hundredths of an inch (4mm) per hour.  On average, that's a light drizzle :)

That reminds me of the most intense rain Debbie and I have ever experienced.  We were just west of Hilo, up in the hills on the Big Island of Hawai'i.  We watched the storm cell approach, saw it dumping torrential rains on Hilo, and then it hit us.  I didn't have any instruments with me, but I did watch things like pots, buckets, etc. filling up.  I guessed the rate at about 4 inches (100mm) per hour, and that rate was sustained for 20 to 30 minutes.  The locals told us that this sort of rainstorm happens regularly; they didn't think of it as unusual at all!

And to validate that, I did a little googling – and discovered that the record one hour rainfall rate is 12 inches per hour.  It's a tie between Hawai'i and Missouri.  So the locals were right – the 4 inches per hour we saw was no big deal :)

Who Lopped the End Off My Graph?

You'd expect a solar intensity graph, taken over the course of a day, to show half a cycle of something approximating a sine wave.  Solar luminosity at any given moment is mainly proportional to the cosine of the sun's elevation in the sky.  There's a little extra attenuation when the sun is at lower elevations, as there's more air for it to travel through – and if the air is dirty, much light will be absorbed by the dust and other particulates.  Out here, though, the air is really clear.  So why does today's solar intensity graph look like this?

From about 9 am to 4 pm, the graph looks like what we'd expect. 

Before 9 am, it's just chopped off.  The reason is straightforward: before 9 am, from the vantage point of the weather station the sun is blocked by Gaskill Peak (one of the mountains forming Lawson Valley's eastern rim).  At 9 am the sun rose over Gaskill Peak, and the intensity jumped to right where you'd expect it. 

After about 3:45 pm, the graph gets all squiggly.  That's happening because at that time the sun is approaching the horizon (again, from the weather station's perspective), which right there is formed by some chaparral brush.  You're seeing the light from the sun being attenuated by highly variable shadows of the chaparral's leaves and branches – perhaps even being moved around by the wind. 

To get a really pretty graph, we'd need to have the weather station up on top of a local peak, with clear views to the horizon where the sun sets and rises (of course this would change throughout the year).

We only had seven and a half hours of bright sunlight today...

Weather Station Heart Transplant...

I'm in the midst of a makeover on our home's IT infrastructure.  Mainly this means removing things – parts of our infrastructure were over 10 years old, and technology has come a long way in that time.  I'm replacing 5 servers, a noisy Cisco 3550 switch, several routers, and some other gear with a single Mac Mini Server, a silent Cisco SG 300-20 switch, and a 3TB mirrored disk array.  Ah, quiet!  And small – this whole setup fits on a single 18" x 36" shelf, with plenty of room to spare.

One of those old servers I've replaced was a Windows 2003 server box – the last vestige of Windows to remain in our home.  It is now shut down, plug pulled out of the wall.  I could do this because WeatherHawk (the manufacturer of my weather station) now has an OS/X software package.  Yesterday I installed that package on our Mac Mini Server, and set it up to report weather as a personal weather station on Weather Underground (the link will be permanently at right).

This new software installed and configured painlessly.  While I can't really see how it's built, I can tell from some of the interactions that its communications protocol implementation is much better than that of the old Windows software I'm replacing.  Getting it connected to Weather Underground was totally painless.  There was a big surprise for me upon installing it, a very pleasant one: the software has the option of working with a MySQL database!  I already had MySQL installed on my server (for my own purposes), so all I had to do was create a database and login for the WeatherHawk software and voila!  I'm now collecting the weather data straight into SQL database – which means that reporting on the data is very straightforward.  Win!

I Don't See What This Guy Thinks Is So Funny!

It's 55°F outside, and I'm freezing my butt off!

Cold Weather in Jamul...

Okay, now all of you who think that a Californian's ideas about what constitutes “cold weather” is funny, just go ahead and start laughing.  Done yet?  Just remember, when you're freezing your sorry butt off, we're warm and sunny...

Friday night was our coldest of the season so far.  It was below freezing for 9 hours, and got down to 27°F (-3°C).  That provoked all sorts of phenomena that we seldom see here.  For example, ice formations in our hummingbird feeders – and very annoyed-looking hummingbirds who kept poking their beaks through the feeder's holes, but got no satisfaction in return.  A group of them hollered at me when I brought my camera out to capture this (for us) unusual sight.

Then I wandered over to our icy patio (practically breaking my neck in the process, slipping on the ice-covered sidewalk).  There I spotted our ash bucket, full of water, and solidly frozen over.  I couldn't break the ice with my hand, but with the heel of my boot I managed to break a bit out.  The ice was about a half inch (one cm) thick – something I've never seen here before. 

I think Al Gore must be in town, celebrating the sale of his loser network to Al Jazeera.  If you ever wanted evidence that there is no fairness in the world, you needn't look any further than Al Gore...

1.9 Inches...

We've had 1.9 inches of rain since Thursday, and there's more in the forecast...

Rain!

In the last 24 hours, we've had 1.2 inches of rain.  Winter is here!  The graph at right shows UTC time, which is currently 8 hours later than our local time.  Most of the rain happened between 8 am and 2 pm local time yesterday.

And the forecast is for more rain, through Sunday.  Woo hoo!

The narcissus are in bloom in our yard – they seem to think it's springtime...

Lenticular Clouds...

We occasionally see lenticular clouds over our local mountains.  A particuarly good display hereabouts might have 3 layers.  Look at these, from near Mt. Rainier!  Via APOD...

Holy Frankenstorm, Batman!

The NOAA released this high-resolution photo earlier today:

It Wasn't in the Forecast...

...but we got it anyway.  Rain.  Six tenths of an inch of lovely, wet rain.  The soil around our house is now wet down to 4 or 5 inches, the mosses have all turned green, the summer's obscuring dust has all been washed off the chaparral.  For the past couple of days, especially right after a shower, it's actually been muggy outside – something rarely felt out here in the high desert.

Three times yesterday we had storm cells move from east to west right over us.  In addition to a downpour, each of them brought lightning and thunder as well (though mostly this happened before the storm actually reached us).

Of course, not only does this rain leave our chaparral clean and green – it also leaves it damp, and that means a greatly reduced fire danger.  How long this protection lasts is very dependent on the future weather, but probably at least a few weeks.  I'll take whatever damper I can get on the fire danger...

The World Isn't Ending...

Reading the lamestream media news reports about the recent East Coast heat wave, you'd think that the world was coming to an end.  Headlines trumpet things like “3,000+ Records Broken!”, and the text of the articles implies that nothing like this has ever been seen before.

Hogwash.

The graph below is courtesy of the indispensable Watts Up With That?.  It shows the number of heat records broken for each year since 1892.  This year isn't even going to be close to the top.  The early part of the last century (before all those carbon-emitting SUVs!) is clearly far “hotter” (at least in this limited sense) than the most recent decade.

Get a grip, folks...

Volcanic Temperatures in Charlottesville, Virginia...

According to this weatherman on a Richmond, Virginia weather station, literally volcanic temperatures:



But I checked my mom's computer (located in her home near Charlottesville), and it's still up.  So this must not be for real :-)

Wind Map of the U.S...

A beautiful animated map rendering of winds in the U.S.  I had to try a few times to successfully load the site; I suspect their servers are being overwhelmed...

Snow on the Mountain...

At higher elevations in our local mountains, it's still cold enough for snow – and with the current storm, we have plenty of it.  Debbie and I took a drive up and around Cuyamaca Mountain yesterday afternoon.  These photos will give you some idea what we ran into.  We thought the snow-covered flowers (like the blue ceanothus below) were particularly beautiful.  As usual, click to enlarge...

Rainageddon Update...

We're now at 2.7 inches (7 cm) of rain for the storm (click to enlarge the graph at right), and the NEXRAD radar shows more headed our way.  The forecast calls for a 40% chance of rain today, then fair weather the rest of the week.  Man, are we wet!

Rainageddon Update...

We're at 2 inches (5 cm) of rain for the storm.  The image below shows the NEXRAD radar image at 6:31 am this morning.  This time I've turned on storm tracks (that's the “Z1” with an arrow) and precipitation monitor.  The blue areas show frozen stuff (snow, in other words) in the mountainous areas.  When the weatherman says “scattered showers”, this is what it looks like on the radar...

The image below is from my rain gauge, showing all the rain in the past few days (the time is GMT).  The most intense rain was near the end of the day on the 17th, which was in the early afternoon yesterday (PDT) – we got a half inch in a half hour, a veritable downpour in these parts...