Berkeley Rain

Standing water in the off-leash dog area at Berkeley’s Cesar Chavez Park.

It started raining about midnight last night and kept up nearly straight through until 10 this evening. I’ve found lots and lots of weather sites online with scads of data to waste my time on, but I’ve never found the “official” Berkeley weather statistics online on a day to day basis; what I see from looking at local home weather stations and several other measurements around town is that we had about 2 inches of rain in the storm. Around the state, I’ve seen numbers over 5 inches along the northern coast and in some parts of the Coast Ranges. Three weeks ago, the universal description of this season was “California’s third dry winter in a row.” It could still turn out that way, but February has been a rainy month nearly everywhere in the state.  

We had to get out for a walk this afternoon and decided to go down to the dog park near the Berkeley Marina. The rain chased almost everyone else away, and we got to slosh around by ourselves for half an hour or 45 minutes. The dog highlight of the day came when Scout spotted a jackrabbit on a knoll about 50 yards away. I saw him go after a rabbit once before, and it was a startling transformation from pet to hare-seeking missile. The same thing happened today: he turned into 55 pounds of flat-out speed and actually closed a good bit of the distance on the rabbit before it vanished into some brush and over a hilltop. Scout disappeared, too. He’s usually very controlled but from my earlier experience I knew he’d keep running as long as he had any sign that the rabbit was nearby. We ran after him and spotted him a couple hundred yards away in a meadow, looking around for us.

(Picture above: Standing water in the dog park; below: dog standing over ground squirrel burrow, with clouds moving along the top of the Berkeley Hills; you can see UC Berkeley’s Campanile in the distance.)

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