Tag: rain

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Ephemeral Stream

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In the big book of seasons, the last three months is supposed to be one season. It feels like three.

Late November and all of December, it was winter here in our coastal lowlands. Meaning: wet. Consistently, almost insistently rainy.

Climate folks warned it might not last: This is a La Niña winter, and the tap could be turned off just like that. And come the first of the year, it was. It stayed dry, bone-dry almost, for virtually all of January and the first half of February. I’ve infuriated Easterners and Midwesterners by mentioning how warm it got during part of that inter-rain-num, so I won’t talk about that again.

Last weekend: Clear and cool, with rain forecast to return Monday. The weather changed on scheduled, and we got a good six-day dousing. In the Sierra, huge snow, just like December. Along our street, with its 22-year-old pavement slowly going to gravel, we have our ephemeral stream running down the gutter again.

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U.S. 101 in the Rain

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Friday morning: Heading north from San Rafael on my way to Santa Rosa. Yes–that San Francisco-bound rush-hour traffic wasn’t doing too well in the rain. Driving up again tomorrow to do some reporting on a radio story. It’s supposed to storm again. Not too much of a deluge, please, rain gods/goddesses.

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California Water: Is the Drought Over?

Is California’s drought over? OK, let me take a step back. Yes, I realize one could debate whether the last three years in California actually constitute a drought. But that’s a discussion for another time. For now, I think everyone can agree that we’ve had lower-than-average precipitation for the past three years.

The only reason to ask the question is that, after the first half of the wet season delivered only spotty rain, we’ve had a pretty solid week of downpours. Water is sluicing into our reservoirs, and the hills are greening up. All of that is a sign of what we think winter should be here. ( My favorite water statistic of the week: when the storms were at their heaviest around Lake Shasta, California’s biggest reservoir, water was flowing into the lake at about 500,000 gallons per second. That’s 1.5 acre feet, or about enough for three “average” households for a year, every second.*)

Amazing numbers like that aside, the people who get paid to think about whether the drought is over say “not yet.” The San Jose Mercury News published a good summary of the situation a couple days ago: “It’s soaking. But the drought’s not over just yet.”

That story does contain one bit of typically odd California thinking about rain and water, though. It quotes a very knowledgeable local meteorologist, Jan Null, about where we stand in terms of normal rainfall. He says: “”We need February and March to be wetter than January to really end the drought. You have to look at the long game here. This is a great start, but we need to keep it going.”

The last sentence stopped me: “This is a great start, but we need to keep it going.”

Of course, Mr. Null recognizes better than most that the amount of rain we get and when we get it is out of anyone’s control. Still, “we’ve got to keep it going.” Maybe he’s a professional rainmaker.

Once you understand the importance of water in California, once you get how crucial the winter rains are, there’s a score-keeping aspect to weather-watching here. It becomes second nature to study the rain gauge and the seasonal precipitation table as an index of performance, a reflection on whether a great collective goal is being attained. Lots of rain means we’re doing well (and that we can put the complexities of water supply out of our minds). A dry spell means we’re failing (and that there will be hell to pay, or at least the strong possibility of stringent conservation measures).

But in reality, there’s no performance going on. The rain is the rain, and the climate is the climate. California’s rainfall is famously variable. Dry spells can be counted on, and the current run of dry years is the third we’ve had since I arrived in Berkeley in the ’70s. My first California winter, 1976-’77, was bone dry and was in fact the second year of the driest two-year period ever recorded here. A decade later, from roughly 1986 through 1992, we had another run of dry years. And if our winter rains were to stop now, we’d be in the fourth year of drier-than-normal years. In between these periods we’ve had average years and very wet years and years that didn’t quite hit the average. That might not be too different from anywhere else. The reason it’s a bigger deal here than it might be in, say, central Wisconsin, is that we have a six-month dry season, we need to store water to get through that, and we have 37 million people and millions and millions acres of farmland that need water whether it’s falling from the sky or not. Thus the need to believe we can wish the rain to keep going during the wet season and the tendency to feel disappointment when the winter turns into a string of dry, sunny days.

*500,000 gallons per second. Here’s the arithmetic: California Department of Water Resources figures (here: http://bit.ly/6HzIuu) show that in the hour between noon and 1 p.m. on Tuesday, January 19, the net inflow into the lake was 66,288 cubic feet per second. That’s the highest inflow figure for any single hour all week. One cubic foot equals 7.48 gallons. 66,288*7.48=495,834.24 gallons. One acre foot=325,851 gallons. And 495,834.24/325,851=1.52 acre feet. Per second. For the entire 24 hours of the 19th, Lake Shasta’s inflow averaged just over 1 acre foot a second.

Bonus feature! KQED’s latest California Reservoir Watch map, updated earlier today:


View KQED: California Reservoir Watch in a larger map

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Storms: Promised and Delivered

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After light showers Friday and Saturday and a steadier drizzling rain much of Sunday, we got heavy rain Monday morning. Just like the weather forecasters and their models predicted. But the summary of coming weather rarely does justice to the reality. In Monday’s case, a pounding early morning rain gave way to showers and then a long, windy break complete with a few flying patches of blue sky. We went out to the Albany Bulb–the old garbage dump of the little suburb just north of us that protrudes into the bay–and gave the dog a run. How was it out there? Blustery, windy enough that a little swell had come up on the Bay and waves were driving all the way up the pocket beach near the Golden Gate Fields racetrack. It started showering again pretty soon after we got back to the car. The next storm arrived, as predicted, early, early this morning, Tuesday. It was heralded by long, deep peals of thunder that at first only The Dog was hearing–he growled every time one sounded. Just before daybreak, the sky opened up for about four hours of thundering, pounding rain. Water shot down the gutters, and all day after and tonight, too, water seems to be flowing everywhere. We had some heavy showers through the day, and tonight the next storm is moving in. It’s supposed to be more intense than today’s. On my last walk with The Dog this morning, I could have sworn I heard a rumbling in the distance, something gathering itself to roll in across the coast; either that, or a string of diesel engines getting ready to roll up the Southern Pacific tracks just west of here.  

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The Forecast, Chicago Style

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 As mentioned many times in the past, we here at Infospigot Information Industries are fond of reading the Area Forecast Discussion (AFD) published online by National Weather Service offices around the country. The AFD gives a broad-brush explanation for the upcoming forecast; they discuss the latest trends in the output from the numerous weather models they follow and give the rationale for why they believe it will be windy and cold but dry tomorrow and the next day instead of warm and rainy. It would not seem to be the kind of writing that has a lot of character to it. Most of the time it isn't. Every once in a while, though, some personality leaks through. In this morning's discussion of upcoming weather from the Chicago office, a forecaster mentions that the weather models show that storms next week will be warmer than expected. Thus the region can expect rain instead of snow. But what about white Christmas? Here's the forecaster's summary (with some of the arcane AFD abbreviations spelled out and the all-caps style left intact): 

HEADING INTO EXTENDED RANGE…GUIDANCE HAS MADE A MAJOR SHIFT IN SCENARIO WITH MID WEEK WEATHER SYSTEM. GFS [GLOBAL FORECAST SYSTEM MODEL] NOW BRINGS DEEPENING LOW NORTHWARD ACROSS ILLINOIS WEDNESDAY NIGHT-THURSDAY SUGGESTING MAINLY A RAIN EVENT FOR MOST OF FORECAST AREA. 00Z [6 P.M. CST THURSDAY] EUROPEAN [MODEL] HAS COME IN FOLLOWING SUIT. THIS LOOKS LIKE A VERY SIMILAR SITUATION AS WHAT WE HAD THE FIRST WEEK OF THIS MONTH. THEREFORE…RATHER THAN RIDE COLDER SNOWY FORECAST INTO THE GROUND…HAVE BEGUN TO TREND AS WARM WITH THIS SYSTEM AS GRID TOLERANCE WILL ALLOW. HOPE NO ONE GOT THEIR KIDS SLEDS FOR CHRISTMAS UNLESS THEY CAN BE ADAPTED FOR USE IN MUD."

As I said, these folks can be a riot. (Picture above: the current GFS Model Forecast from Unisys Weather.)

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Summer Rainbow

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I’ve long been a fan of photographic panoramas. Once a long time ago, we went to the farm near Dyersville, Iowa, where “Field of Dreams” was filmed, and I took a series of shots of the baseball field from the farmhouse porch. When I got the pictures back, I spent a while creating a mosaic of the shots, then had them mounted and framed as a present for my dad. I think he’s still got it hanging on his wall. One of the unexpected artifacts in the pictures was a guy who was walking along the right-field and first-base line; he appears in several shots in the “panorama.”

Nowadays, I’m sure there’s some sort of really good software that helps you stitch together digital pictures. Me, I have an application for the Mac called DoubleTake that does an OK job. One of the first things you realize when using it, though, is that it can’t really give you a seamless rendering of more than two shots. Not that I mind–I’m not a pro and I’m taking pictures with a pocket-sized camera.

But every once in a while, I wish I had the equipment, the knowledge, and the other wherewithal that would knit together with my enthusiasm for wide-angle scenes. Case in point: This evening just before sunset, we got an exceedingly rare July rainfall. The sun was below the edge of the clouds, and as soon as the rain started falling–very lightly–I knew we’d see a rainbow. And in a few minutes, there it was: a full arch and a full “double” image. The colors on the descending legs were so bright they appeared fluorescent. I ran in the house and got the beat-up Casio and shot away. I shot away knowing that I wouldn’t capture the real brilliance of the light and that I’d need three shots, minimum, to get the full expanse of the rainbow.

So that’s where that image up there comes from (click for a larger image–the full size is 2400×900-some pixels). To make the rainbow look continuous, I compromised on the bottom edge of the pictures, where you can see some strange things happening with trees and houses.

On to the next experiment. (And if you want to check out a panoramic picture system, take a look at this.)

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June Rain

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Just after 10 o’clock tonight, the dog and I walked out the front door for a walk. He stopped on the porch and stared out at the street as if asking, “What’s that?” It was rain, an out-of-season occurrence. My tendency, confronted with weather that’s not supposed to happen at whatever time of year it’s happening, is to say, “This never happens.” Then I try to look it up.

So here’s a brief rundown on June rain in Berkeley, thanks to the Climate Summary and Monthly Total Precipitation tables at the Western Regional Climate Center.

–Years of record: 102 (1893 through 2008, with 16 missing).
–Berkeley mean June rainfall: 0.19 inches (annual mean: 23.45 inches).
–June maximum: 1.24 inches (1907). Other Junes with 1 inch or more: 1894, 1929, 1967, 1995, 2005.
–June minimum: 0.00 inches (38 times).

Five highest June rainfall totals:
June 15, 1929: 1.04 inches.
June 2, 1967: 0.88 inches.
June 8, 1964: 0.69 inches.
June 17, 1894: 0.63 inches.
June 11, 1907, and June 24, 1912: 0.61 inches.

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June Rain

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Just after 10 o’clock tonight, the dog and I walked out the front door for a walk. He stopped on the porch and stared out at the street as if asking, “What’s that?” It was rain, an out-of-season occurrence. My tendency, confronted with weather that’s not supposed to happen at whatever time of year it’s happening, is to say, “This never happens.” Then I try to look it up.

So here’s a brief rundown on June rain in Berkeley, thanks to the Climate Summary and Monthly Total Precipitation tables at the Western Regional Climate Center.

–Years of record: 102 (1893 through 2008, with 16 missing).
–Berkeley mean June rainfall: 0.19 inches (annual mean: 23.45 inches).
–June maximum: 1.24 inches (1907). Other Junes with 1 inch or more: 1894, 1929, 1967, 1995, 2005.
–June minimum: 0.00 inches (38 times).

Five highest June rainfall totals:
June 15, 1929: 1.04 inches.
June 2, 1967: 0.88 inches.
June 8, 1964: 0.69 inches.
June 17, 1894: 0.63 inches.
June 11, 1907, and June 24, 1912: 0.61 inches.

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Big Bathtub I: The Acre Foot

An acre foot is the amount of water it would take to flood an acre to a depth of one foot. An acre is, ballpark number only, a patch of land 100 feet by 400 feet. If you were standing on that patch of land with water about halfway up to your knees — well, you’d be having a direct experience of the acre foot.

An acre foot is 325,000 gallons. If you pay a water bill that shows how much you use, you can figure how long that much water would last you. The rule of thumb, that we journalists borrowed from “water experts” here in California was that an acre foot was enough to supply two average households for a year. That’s for use inside and outside the home for three or four people say, and it comes out to about 460 gallons a day for each household. Of course, there’s a lot of variation. An inner city apartment dweller uses a lot less than someone whose lawn looks like a fairway at Augusta National. Someone in a cool coastal area — Berkeley, for instance — uses less than someone in a much hotter area on the other side of the hills, lawn or no lawn.

The acre foot is a basic unit of life in California. Yes, weather people and water management officials count inches of rain and snow in the winter. But those units are incidental in a place that needs to capture and store an immense amount of water to irrigate roughly 15,000 square miles of crops and to supply 36 million people. The acre foot is the fundamental currency of reservoir storage and water delivery.

Up and down California, the federal government, the state government, electric utilities, county and city water companies, and irrigation districts have built reservoirs. They’re big bathtubs that together hold something like 42 million acre feet; that would be enough to submerge the entire state of Wisconsin under a foot of water. They reservoirs are expected to fill up in the winter and spring with runoff from the rains and melting snow running down from the Sierra Nevada. Then the water is pumped out during the dry season to help the fields and orchards thrive and to keep the showers and garden hoses flowing. Some water is even set aside for the fish that swim in dwindling numbers through the maze of waterways between reservoir, farm, and town.

A wet winter here–what people like to think of as normal, with nature’s tap switched on when we get into the middle of autumn–keeps our big bathtubs full and the water running where it’s needed. But there are other kinds of winters, too. Very wet ones, where the system simply can’t hold all the water coming down the rivers. And dry and very dry ones, where the water level in the reservoirs falls and keeps falling if two dry years come back to back.

We’re in what appears to be our third dry–or drier than “normal”–year in a row. Three of the biggest federal reservoirs in Northern California– Shasta, Oroville, and Folsom–all fell to critically low levels in December and January. Together, the three reservoirs can hold about 9 million acre feet; that’s about enough to supply a year’s worth of household water for New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New Hampshire, Vermont, and Maine. That’s every U.S. resident east of the Great Lakes and north of the Mason-Dixon Line.

Remember,: that’s the capacity of just three reservoirs. There are dozens of others. During the last five weeks, copious rains have fallen and the water has started to rise in some of those big bathtubs. More about that later.

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Rain Chronicles

This will not be a banner precipitation season for California–though always keep your eye out for the neighbor building boats and inviting in pairs of every creature. But that doesn’t mean it is without interest. For starters, it could well be a significantly below-par year for rain and snow here, which would make it three such years in a row, and that’s never good news. Already this year, the probability of a third drought year is getting spun by the governor and his water people to bolster their campaign for more dams and fancy plumbing. You have to admire their pluck; with the state $40 billion in the hole just to buy things like bullets for the Highway Patrol, stun guns for prison guards, paper clips for the bureaucrats, and adult diapers for the Legislature, the guv and company are talking about getting the taxpayers to spring for another $10 billion or so.

Anyway. Talking rain at work today, someone produced a list that purports to show that a place called Blue Canyon, on Interstate 80 (and the Union Pacific) in the Sierra, is one of the 10 wettest locations in the Lower 48 states (and the wettest in California). It gets 68 inches of precipitation a year. No way, no how that is the wettest place in California. My money’s on Honeydew, a hamlet on the Mattole River in Humboldt County. With our neighbors, the Martinuccis, we actually drove through Honeydew once on our way up the coast. I have an impression of a general store and a narrow bridge. There’s some evidence–disappointingly scanty, to be honest, but it includes an official-looking listing of each state’s wettest location–that Honeydew regularly gets 100 inches plus of rain a year.

And leaving Honeydew out of the picture for a moment, there are at least half a dozen places up on the North Coast–towns like Fort Dick and Crescent City in Del Norte County–and further south–like Cazadero in Sonoma County–all average more than 70 inches a year.

Not that Blue Canyon doesn’t deserve attention. Some with the Weather Service credit it with being the snowiest recording station in the Lower 48 (averaging 240.8 inches a year). But here’s my favorite: in a table succinctly labeled “Mean Monthly and Annual Number of Hours with Measurable Precipitation, with Percent of Hours and Maximum 1-Hour Totals,” Blue Canyon is way out ahead of any California listing: On average, it’s precipitating there 10.6 percent of the hours in the year–928 hours and 30 minutes, roughly. Of course, that would make it just a run-of-the-mill place in much of Oregon and Washington (Portland’s percentage of precipitation hours per year: 10.9).