Category: Weather

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The Control of Nature: Primitive Hydraulics

Sunday morning: Still raining.

We’ve had .42 of an inch so far today (it’s 1:30 p.m. daylight-saving style) to go with the 6.48 over the past nine days.
The rain has prompted me to return to an old wet-weather routine that Kate and I have called, in a nod to a favorite writer and a favorite series of articles in The New Yorker, “the control of nature.”

When we moved into our house in April 1988, it was noted in some document somewhere that there was a sump pump on the premises. I found out where the pump was and why it was there the following winter.

Our house has a crawl space. Our lot is on a slope paralleling the course of Schoolhouse Creek. The stream itself has been moved underground, but as we found out one very wet December day a little more than 10 years ago, too much water arriving all at once can, along with a clogged storm drain upstream, bring the creek back above ground.

Water appears less dramatically in our crawl space, and that’s why there’s a sump pump down there.

Usually, a murky pool will gather in a spot that’s been excavated to allow access to the crawl space. Sometimes, as in deluge that arrived early the morning of New Year’s Day 1997, the space will start to fill. That was the one and only occasional the pump, installed in a little concrete well built around our floor furnace to keep the heater from getting flooded, turned on.

Perhaps one reason the pump hasn’t been more active is because I try to keep the crawl space drained when I see water gathering there.

Control of nature requires gravity and a garden hose. I take the full hose, stick one end of it into the watery crawl space. Then I run the hose down the driveway — 30 to 40 linear feet and 3 to 4 vertical feet — to the street.

I set the hose running last night about 9 o’clock. It’s still running. How much water has come out of there in that time?

I tried to calculate the rate by measuring the flow into a 1-cup measure (yes — this has the possibility of introducing a large error; but let’s just agree I’m not being perfectly scientific). In four trials, the cup filled up in about 6 to 7 seconds. Based on that, I figure somewhere between 32 and 38 gallons are draining out every hour. And that would put the total for the 15 hours or so the thing has been running at 480 to 570 gallons. Which is more than I would have guessed.

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Berkeley Rainfall: Six and a Half Inches in Nine Days

While I’m poring over state and federal databases and pondering what it would be like to live through a year with 145.9 inches of rain (Cooskie Mountain, in the King Range of southern Humboldt County, in 2006) or a month with 43 inches of rain (Gasquet Ranger Station, on the Smith River in Del Norte County, December 1996) or 42 inches in nine days (yes, it happened: Bucks Lake, Plumas County, in January-December ’96-’97), let me record what we have actually seen here in Berkeley the last week or so:

Friday, March 4: .46 inches
Saturday, March 5: 2.61 inches
Sunday, March 6: .50 inches
Monday, March 7: .46 inches
Tuesday, March 8: 0
Wednesday, March 9: .13 inches
Thursday, March 10: .87 inches

Friday, March 11: .46 inches
Saturday, March 12: .99 inches (and counting)

That’s a total of 6.48 inches in nine days, as recorded on our cheap, semi-dependable (it’s very close to neighboring totals reported on Weather Underground) Oregon Scientific wireless rain monitor.
A pretty rainy spell, the rainiest this winter by far.

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Rain

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Above: From NASA’s Worldview site, an image of California’s first real storm of the wet season (click for a larger version, or check it out on Worldvew). Here’s (a slightly edited version of) how the National Weather Service’s San Francisco Bay Area forecast office described the weather system as it was shaping up early Sunday:

AS OF 09:59 AM PST SUNDAY...NORTH AND CENTRAL
CALIFORNIA ARE CURRENTLY POSITIONED IN THE BOUNDARY
BETWEEN TWO LARGE FEATURES. TO THE SOUTH...THE
HIGH PRESSURE THAT HELPED TO BRING CLEAR SKIES AND UNSEASONABLY
WARM TEMPERATURES OVER THE PREVIOUS FEW DAYS. TO THE NORTH...AN
APPROACHING STORM SYSTEM WITH A POTENT MOISTURE TAP. A COLD
FRONTAL BOUNDARY IS SEPARATING THESE TWO AIR MASSES AND IS EVIDENT
ON BOTH RADAR AND SATELLITE FROM THE THICK BAND OF CLOUDS AND
CONTINUOUS RAINFALL REFLECTIVITIES ASSOCIATED WITH IT. THIS
FRONTAL BOUNDARY IS CURRENTLY DRAPED FROM NORTHWESTERN CALIFORNIA
THROUGH SOUTHEASTERN OREGON AND HAS BROUGHT UP TO 2.5" OF RAIN
ALONG THE HIGHER TERRAIN OF THE OREGON COAST AND UP TO 2" OVER THE
HIGHER TERRAIN OF THE NORTHWESTERN CALIFORNIA COAST. THESE HIGHER
VALUES ARE SUPPORTED BY A TROPICAL pMOISTURE PLUME WITH PRECIPITABLE WATER VALUES
RANGING FROM 1.2"-1.6" WHICH ARE 150-200 PERCENT WETTER THAN NORMAL.
LOWER ELEVATION LOCATIONS IN THESE AREAS HAVE NOT PICKED UP NEARLY
AS MUCH... RANGING FROM SEVERAL HUNDREDTHS TO A FEW TENTHS. WE
WILL LIKELY SEE SIMILAR ELEVATION BASED PRECIP SCALING FROM THE
FRONT AS IT MOVES THROUGH OUR AREA THIS AFTERNOON AND INTO EARLY
MONDAY.

The rain started here in Berkeley about 9 p.m. or so. It’s been more than a drizzle: .29 of an inch in the last couple of hours, on the off chance that the backyard rain gauge (which I got just after the last rain of the spring) is correct. That seems to line up with other rain gauges around town that report on Weather Underground. We’ll see how accurate it looks tomorrow.

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A July Surprise: Actual Rain

The fact it’s July notwithstanding, the National Weather Service forecast rain for Thursday. Our seasonal but only faintly known monsoon — it occasionally brings heavy rain to the Sierra and other ranges but rarely visits the lowlands with rain — has been potent this year. Despite that, it was a surprise when rain began pattering on the roof early this afternoon. And just as surprising when showers started up again about nightfall.

How much did it add up to? Our rain gauge, which has gotten very little use since we set it up in the spring, recorded .05 of an inch. Other weather stations around town — I find it hard to find the “official” reading here — recorded up to about .10.

Checking the Western Regional Climate Center records for Berkeley, it appears the official record for the date here was .10, in 1974. The average monthly July rainfall for Berkeley, in records that go back (though with some gaps) to 1893, is .03 of an inch.

And the wettest July day ever recorded in Berkeley is actually kind of surprising: 1.40 inches, on July 8, 1974. That was part of a storm that swept the region and yes, made headlines. Here’s the front-page portion of a story from the Marin Independent Journal (and below that, the PDF of the entire front page, which features a six-column picture of a flooded U.S. 101 in Corte Madera as well as some better-known history):

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Daily_Independent_Journal_Mon__Jul_8__1974_.pdf

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Frontyard Visitor: The Gulf Fritillary

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Wednesday it rained. Thursday it rained. Saturday, it rained again.

Right there’s some news. Even though the rain didn’t amount to much — I’d guess just an inch or so here in Berkeley for all three “storms” — that was the most concentrated precipitation we’ve had since April, I’d guess. Today (Sunday) was clear, and that after avoiding even looking at the yard for a long time — the front “lawn” has not been watered in several seasons and looks worse than dead — I thought I’d taken advantage of the warm, dry weather and clean things up a little.

One of my chores was to cut down the mostly dead stalks of our September-blooming sunflowers (Helianthus salicifolius). I did that, then picked up the whole bundle of stalks to stuff in our green can (the one for “yard waste). As I started to push the stuff into the can, I realized there was a beautiful orange butterfly tangled up in the mass of dead stems and leaves. I thought it was dead, but then it moved. So I pulled stalks out of the can to give it more space to wriggle free. It quickly extricated itself. I ran for my camera, but it flew before I could get a shot.

I ran and grabbed my camera and followed it for a few minutes down the block. The undersides of the butterfly’s wings are gorgeous — “spangled in iridescent silver,” as one description I found puts it. I couldn’t manage to get a clear shot of the undersides, though.

Kate went online to make the identification: a Gulf fritillary (Agraulis vanillae). The Bay Area is about as far north as these get in California, though they have been seen recently in the Davis and Sacramento areas. Here are a couple links with details:

The name “Gulf fritillary”: Well, “Gulf” comes from their association with areas bordering the Gulf of Mexico. And “fritillary”? A U.S. Forest Service “pollinator of the month” page explains:

The common name comes from a Latin word, fritillus, which means chessboard or dice box. Fritillary is also the name of a flower with an interesting checkered pattern; it is obvious that both the flower and the butterfly get their common name because of such pattern. Another name for these handsome butterflies is silverspots because of the metallic markings on their wings undersides. It is possible that this pattern, similar to a leopard’s spots, serves as camouflage when they are resting in places of dappled sun and shade spots.

Getting in further over my head: It should be noted that the Gulf fritillary is a member of the same butterfly subfamily, Nymphalidae (brush-footed butterflies) but a different tribe (Heliconiini) from the rest of the fritillaries (Argynnini). I didn’t know butterflies had tribes. And that’s as far as I’m going to take the fritillary story for this evening.

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Slideshow: Lake Oroville, Before and After

Thanks to the miracles of software and the Internet, I put together a short slideshow comparing scenes at Lake Oroville as I shot them late last March and yesterday. If I’d known back then to what extent the lake would empty out, I would have taken pictures all along the shoreline. As it was, the pictures I did take of the lake were an afterthought, something to do before we started to head home.

The big surprise in the “after” pictures, the ones I took yesterday, is the landscape revealed by the receding waters. There’s no hint looking at the surface in March what the underwater topography looks like. And it’s amazing looking at the exposed landscape now (it was drowned in 1969, when the new reservoir was first filled) and how completely it’s been scoured of anything that might suggest that before Oroville Dam was built, these were canyons choked with oak, pine and brush.

Here’s the slideshow which includes a few bonus shots at the end):

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Lake Oroville, Pre-Drought and Now

Kate and I went up to Lake Oroville for a couple days last spring. We found a great campground on the south side of the lake, which is the main water storage facility for the State Water Project and at 3.5 million acre feet, California’s second biggest reservoir (Lake Shasta, at 4.5 million, is No. 1). Our real purpose was to go further up into the foothills for a hike out to a falls we had read about. But before we headed back home, I took a few pictures down around the boat ramp nearest our campground, in an area called Loafer Creek.

Before I drove back up there today, I checked the Department of Water Resources data for the reservoir level both on March 27 last year, when the top picture was taken, and today. The numbers show that despite the dry second half of last winter, the lake was about 85 percent full on the day I was taking pictures. The elevation of the lake surface above sea level was reported at 860.37 feet, and, with the help of a couple of small storms that blew through in April, the lake level kept rising for the next several weeks, with the surface topping out at 871.75 feet above sea level.

In the current water year, which for the Department of Water Resources runs from Oct. 1 through Sept. 30, Lake Oroville has seen 2.44 inches of rain. Just a guess: that’s about 10 percent of average for this date. Of that 2.44 inches, 1.96 fell on Nov 19th and 20th. The last rain was recorded Dec. 7, six weeks ago today. Not a drop has come down during the weeks that are typically the wettest of the year in this part of the world.

Which is why I went to take another look. The lake’s surface elevation today — drawn down by 10 months of water releases to generate power and send supplies down to the southern end of the Bay Area, the San Joaquin Valley, and those big cities far to the south — now stands at 701feet, 159 feet below where I saw it last time. That’s roughly 35 percent full. I wondered how dramatically different it would look.

The truth is that if I didn’t have the earlier set of pictures and some fixed landmarks, I would have hardly recognized it as the same place. Here’s one example (and here’s the full Flickr slideshow: Lake Oroville, January 2014):

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Lake Oroville at Loafer Creek: March 27, 2013

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Lake Oroville at Loafer Creek: January 18, 2014

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September

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Warm and clear. Our most fog-free month. Our warmest month. Nothing in the yards and gardens wants to quit. The fauna, the flora, they just keep going as the light gets shorter, the dark gets longer, the world cools toward what even here we call winter.

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Home, Sunday Afternoon

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Sunday afternoon activity: Sitting here wondering if it will really rain over the next couple of days, as the forecasts have suggested for a few days, or not. So far, we’ve had clouds and some drizzle. While I ponder the relatively unusual prospect of a late June rainfall in the Bay Area, I was looking at weather satellite pictures, and then at loops of satellite pictures made over the last few hours. I started to wonder whether I could find a full day’s worth of those looped images, or maybe a week’s or a month’s. I still haven’t found anything like that. But I did find plenty of versions of the the stock views from NOAA’s GOES West (GOES stands for Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite). No matter how many times I see it, the view of the full disk of the Earth (above, taken this morning; click for a larger image) evokes wonder. Below (click for much larger image) is the West Coast in beautiful enhanced infrared color, complete with the weather systems that could bring us rain.

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May Rain

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It rained last night in our part of the Bay Area. Not a lot–just enough to sort of wet everything down and leave water beaded everywhere on foliage this morning (like the neighbor’s parking-strip apple tree). In most of the country, rain in May would not be news. Here it’s rare, but not unheard of. As Jan Null, a local meteorologist who has pored over San Francisco’s precipitation history, told his email list over the weekend:

Rain in San Francisco at some point during the Memorial Day* weekend has occured on 34 occasions (21% of the the time) in the 163 years since rainfall records began in San Francisco in 1850. Rain has fallen on Saturday 15 times (9%), Sunday 23 times (14%) and on Monday 16 times (10%).

The last time there was rain at any point on a Memorial Day weekend was Sat., May 28, 2011, when 0.28 inches fell. The last time rain fall on the Monday of Memorial Day weekend was in 1993 when 0.01 inches fell. And the last time there was rain on all three days of the weekend was in 1932 with 0,26, 0.18 and 0.10 for a total of 0,54 inches.

The rainiest Memorial Day weekend was 1906 with a total of 1.64 inches, and the rainiest single day of a Memorial Day weekend was Sunday, May 27, 1990 with 1.42 inches.

* Formerly known as Decoration Day dating back to the Civil War.