Category: Current Affairs

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Dry December Update

“Rain, rain, rain, rain,
Why’d you cause me so much pain?”
—”The Rains Came,” Sir Douglas Quintet

Southern California got a little spritz of rain over the weekend—nearly a fifth of an inch yesterday in the desert town of Blythe. Here, it’s dry, and the California-Nevada River Forecast Center sees only a small chance that rain will fall over the northern part of the state in the next week (and that will be far north of the Bay Area). Our local National Weather Service forecast office, in Monterey, reads the models the same way: “Dry and mild weather will continue through at least the next 7 days … with little variation in the upper level weather pattern. A series of storm systems will move towards the region over the next week … but pass to the north and east of the area. ” The longer-range outlook from NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center is for drier and warmer than median weather.

Here’s the local NWS table on precipitation so far this year. And below that, today’s theme song

Station July 1-Dec. 18, 2011 % of Normal July 1-Dec. 18, 2010 % of Normal July 1-Dec. 18 Normal July 1-June 30 Normal
SFO Int’l Airport 2.87 50 5.76 101 5.69 20.11
Oakland Airport 3.06 52 6.66 113 5.91 17.42
Mountain View Airport 1.73 45 3.24 85 3.83 13.35
San Jose Airport 1.53 39 3.05 77 3.95 15.08
Santa Rosa Airport 4.45 42 13.19 123 10.70 31.91
Salinas Airport 3.31 103 3.45 107 3.21 12.91
San Francisco Downtown 3.35 47 7.88 111 7.08 22.28

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Chicken Coop Portraiture

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Among my many other claims to greatness, I’m currently the Mayor of Berkeley’s Edible Schoolyard Chicken Coop on Foursquare (I know–it’s hard to believe I’ve been able to fit so much into one short life). The coop is a regular stop on our Saturday morning perambulation through the neighborhood with The Dog; his attention focuses alternately on the chickens, who I imagine look like tasty friends, and the many squirrels chasing through an adjacent live oak. The chickens are fascinating to me, too–mostly in that this group (about 15 chickens and two or three ducks) has, notwithstanding the occasional expiration, appeared to stay so healthy for so long.

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Journal of Self-Promotion, Sports Radio Edition

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A week of light posting because, well, there was work to do. I got to do a little radio feature on the San Francisco 49ers for an NPR sports show produced at Boston’s WBUR, “Only A Game.” It was sort of a quick-hit story, and the field reporting involved going to a couple fan bars last Sunday. People were amazingly willing to talk, for the most part, and they were not even liquored up. The folks at WBUR did a very nice job on the story, too.

Link to the story page: Jim Harbaugh Inspires ‘Niners to Division Title

And the MP3 link to the story audio.

Oh, yeah, and here’s the rap that’s referenced in the story:

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Hey, Rainmaker

A dry summer, and then comes the fall
Which I depend on most of all.
Hey rainmaker can you hear the call?
Please let these crops grow tall.

—The Band, “King Harvest”

We had some rain overnight–just enough to keep the dust down, if there had been any dust (we did have plenty of crap in the air, though: a miasma of car exhaust, smoke, and other metropolitan exhalations that led the regional air district to ban wood fires for four days in a row). The “storm” total in San Francisco for the rain that started falling last night is .04 of an inch–four-hundredths–and according to the National Weather Service is the first rain since we got .21 of an inch on Thanksgiving.

Meantime, continuing my claim to be the first in my neighborhood to express precipitation anxiety this year, the state Department of Water Resources and its California Data Exchange Center are out with their latest summary of hydrologic conditions for the state. Here’s my summary of their summary: November 2010 was wet, November 2011 was dry. Or in the summary’s own machete-proof prose:

On November 30, the Northern Sierra 8-Station Precipitation Index Water Year total was 6.5 inches, which is about 70 percent of the seasonal average to date and 13 percent of an average water year (50.0 inches). During November, the total precipitation for the 8-Stations was 2.6 inches, which is about 41 percent of the monthly average. Last year on November 30, the seasonal total for the 8-Stations was 15.5 inches, or about 167 percent of average for the date. On November 30, the San Joaquin 5-Station Precipitation Index Water Year total was 4.0 inches, which is about 59 percent of the seasonal average to date and 10 percent of an average water year (40.8 inches). During November, the total precipitation for the 5-Stations was 1.5 inches, or about 32 percent of the monthly average. Last year on November 30, the seasonal total for the 5-Stations to date was 14.4 inches, or about 212 percent of average for the date.

Of course, one or two good drenchings will make all this early-season anxiousness go away.

Related:
It’s December. Do You Know Where Your Rain Is?
KQED: California Reservoir Watch

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Curbside Eclipse

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This morning’s lunar eclipse, shot across the roof of a house across the street. Not many this morning trod the frosty street, to paraphrase Dylan Thomas, but when Kate and I went out to watch, about 6 o’clock, we heard voices of a couple of neighbors down the block. So we had a small viewing party, five of of us in all plus The Dog, conducted (for me) without the intervention of caffeine. Now we’re back indoors, the sun’s coming up, and I’m going back to bed.

Here’s the slideshow, with good shots and bad and a few that put the one above in neighborhood context:

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Vulture Beach Drama

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Saturday in Fort Bragg: Just north of the mouth of Pudding Creek, a couple of dozen turkey vultures were hanging out around a low bluff above the beach–sunning themselves, taking off on short flights to check out the local offal, then back for more sunning, and grooming, and occasional dramatic wing spreading and beaking (if “beaking” is what you call it when two birds go beak-to-beak).

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Road Blog: Mendocino Vineyard

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Back home in Berkeley tonight. But at noontime today, we stopped on our way south at Toulouse, a vineyard and winery along Highway 128 in Mendocino County. We went into the tasting room and bought some wine, then walked up through the vineyards briefly. One bird note: We see robins down here, of course. They’re everywhere, right? But up at Toulouse today, their presence was a little more than we see around the city. hundreds if not thousands of robins filled trees around the harvested vineyards. Checking one Mendocino birding site, the county seems to be a major wintering locale for American robins (Turdus migratorius; yes, “Turdus”; it’s Latin for “thrush”; you know there’s a whole story about why it’s called “robin,” but some of us can’t stay up all night to tell it).

A general explanation for the robin swarm around the vineyards comes from Cornell’s Birds of North America: “The diet of the robin is … highly variable, changing from primarily soft invertebrates, especially earthworms, in spring and summer, to primarily fruit in autumn and winter. During the nonbreeding season, large flocks of hundreds or thousands of immature and adult birds migrate to lower elevations and latitudes, where they form roosting aggregations from which they track sources of berries.” Cornell also notes that the robin is a relatively recent arrival in much of California west of the Sierra foothills, not pushing into other parts of the state until irrigation and well-watered lawns (and thus a richer supply of earthworms near the surface) made it possible for the bird to extend its range. And one more note from that Mendocino County site: robins (and some other abundant songbirds) are favored prey of some raptors (peregrine falcons and sharp-shinned hawks, among others).

The sound of the birds near the vineyard was remarkable enough I recorded some audio and will try to post that later.

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Road Blog: Mendocino Vineyard

toulouse120411.jpg

Back home in Berkeley tonight. But at noontime today, we stopped on our way south at Toulouse, a vineyard and winery along Highway 128 in Mendocino County. We went into the tasting room and bought some wine, then walked up through the vineyards briefly. One bird note: We see robins down here, of course. They’re everywhere, right? But up at Toulouse today, their presence was a little more than we see around the city. hundreds if not thousands of robins filled trees around the harvested vineyards. Checking one Mendocino birding site, the county seems to be a major wintering locale for American robins (Turdus migratorius; yes, “Turdus”; it’s Latin for “thrush”; you know there’s a whole story about why it’s called “robin,” but some of us can’t stay up all night to tell it).

A general explanation for the robin swarm around the vineyards comes from Cornell’s Birds of North America: “The diet of the robin is … highly variable, changing from primarily soft invertebrates, especially earthworms, in spring and summer, to primarily fruit in autumn and winter. During the nonbreeding season, large flocks of hundreds or thousands of immature and adult birds migrate to lower elevations and latitudes, where they form roosting aggregations from which they track sources of berries.” Cornell also notes that the robin is a relatively recent arrival in much of California west of the Sierra foothills, not pushing into other parts of the state until irrigation and well-watered lawns (and thus a richer supply of earthworms near the surface) made it possible for the bird to extend its range. And one more note from that Mendocino County site: robins (and some other abundant songbirds) are favored prey of some raptors (peregrine falcons and sharp-shinned hawks, among others).

The sound of the birds near the vineyard was remarkable enough I recorded some audio and will try to post that later.

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Road Blog: Fort Bragg Xmas Extravaganza

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We drove up to Fort Bragg with a plan of driving someplace in the interior of the county–Montgomery Redwoods State Reserve, near Comptche in the back of beyond, was one candidate. But in the full light of day and looking out at the coast right outside our window, it seemed to make a lot more sense to just hang here. So we went for a long walk up a coastal trail to MacKerricher State Park north of town, then back. The Dog, for one, was delighted. Then we went and had a bowl of clam chowder down by the Noyo River harbor. We started back to town, then Kate remembered a plaque about the local salmon fishery she wanted to show me. The plaque was on the outside wall of a restaurant at the harbor. When we pulled into the parking lot, there was a pickup truck parked there towing a dory festooned with Christmas lights. A woman wearing a Santa hat was standing next to it. “Making your rounds?” I said. “Yeah, I start early,” she said. Then she told me that the boat was decked out for the town’s annual Christmas parade, starring local working vehicles like logging trucks and yes, a few boats. “Seven o’clock. You should come out. It’s a big deal for our little town,” she said, adding that it has been going on for something like 75 years. So after going back to our room, taking a nap, watching part of the Wisconsin-Michigan State game, we walked across the pedestrian trestle from our motel into town and found the parade. The vessel pictured (at the corner of North Main Street and East Redwood Avenue) is the one we saw down by the harbor.

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It’s December. Do You Know Where Your Rain Is?

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It’s December now in the Bay Area, and if you’re fastidious about your weather expectations, you look out the window and want to see rain. Or at least a little gray. But in the wake of the little wind event of the past couple of days, what I see out there is a sparkling azure sky without a hint of a cloud.

Our climate is mostly dry from sometime in April to sometime in October, mostly wet from October to April, except when it’s not. And when it’s not, we’ve got trouble. Yes, things in the cities are beautiful, and when you turn on the spigot, water from somewhere magically appears. But you know that somewhere–up in the Sierra, out in the Valley–things aren’t so good. There won’t be enough mountain snow to help replenish the reservoirs in the spring. The farmers will want water they cannot get. The fish and wildlife that depend on an abundant flow of water through the Delta, species threatened because for decades they were last in line when people thought about how to spend the water we bank, will suffer. The edge to the anxiety comes from the knowledge that drought happens here, and drought can become a social and political as well as a natural and environmental mess.

Feeling nervous yet? I am. I follow Jan Null, a Bay Area meteorologist. Here’s his climate summary for last month:

November 2011 was a cool and mostly dry month across California. Monthly average maxima anomalies were -1.0 (San Jose) to -3.6 degrees (Los Angeles), while monthly mean anomalies were -0.8 to -2.3 degrees. North of the Tehachapis rainfall was well below normal ranging from 28% of normal (Sacramento) to 69% (Eureka) while Southern California was quite wet with Los Angeles and San Diego at 152% and 309% of normal respectively.

Sometimes, to reassure myself that all will soon be well, I might take a spin through weather and climate sites to see what the professionals are saying about the forecast. That image to the right is a graphic of the Quantitative Precipitation Forecast from the California Nevada River Forecast Center. During a wet period, the map will be a glorious swirl of color–blue and green and yellow, depicting progressively heavier precipitation, and sometimes orange and splashes of red and magenta when it’s really wet (there’s a scale at the top of the map; click on the image for a full-size version). Gray, on the other hand, means dry. No rain in the lowlands. No snow in the uplands. No reassurance.

Next, here’s how one of the meteorologists down in the Bay Area National Weather Service office in Monterey sums up the coming week in the Area Forecast Discussion (using familiar all-caps weather advisory style):

DRY WEATHER LOOKS TO BE IN STORE FOR THE DISTRICT SUNDAY THOUGH NEXT WEEK. HOWEVER…THE MODELS ARE STARTING TO SHOW SOME DIFFERENCES. THE ECMWF KEEPS A STRONG RIDGE ALONG 135W STRETCHING INTO THE GULF OF ALASKA WITH A STRONG SHORTWAVE DIVING DOWN THROUGH THE GREAT BASIN LATE THURSDAY INTO FRIDAY. THIS SCENARIO WOULD BRING ANOTHER BOUT OF GUSTY OFFSHORE WINDS. THE GFS WEAKENS AND FLATTENS THE RIDGE BY THE END OF NEXT WEEK…WITH A SHORTWAVE MOVING INTO THE NORTHERN PLAINS NOT DIVING SHARPLY SOUTHEAST. THIS WOULD NOT BE A WINDY SCENARIO FOR THE DISTRICT. REGARDLESS OF THE MODEL…DRY WEATHER IS IN STORE THROUGH THE END OF THE NEXT WORKWEEK.

Got that? The major question the weather persons are dealing with is whether or not the forecast models indicate another windstorm for the coming week. Chances of rain–none apparent.

The pluviophile now turns eyes to the coming month, even though we’re exiting the realm of forecasting and prediction and entering into one of probabilities and outlooks. But here goes: The National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center says the Bay Area should have “near median” precipitation in the period from eight to 14 days from now (median in this case meaning rainfall along the lines of the “middle 10 years” of the past three decades in terms of rainfall); the northern quarter of California is looking at below-median rainfall during that period. The center’s one-month outlook shows equal chances of above, below, or near median precipitation. That’s because “there were no strong and consistent climate signals” among the forecast models.

And one last stop: Both the most recent U.S. Drought Monitor report and the seasonal outlook, through the end of February, show California drought-free (things look scary in Texas, though).

So where’s the rain? Like that TV show used to say: Out there. Somewhere.