Tag: weather

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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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January

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What the drought looks like: clear sky, a touch of green on the hills, and bone-dry trails. This was at the top of the Seaview Trail in Tilden Park, in the hills above Berkeley, this afternoon. That’s Mount Diablo in the slightly dirty distance. Met dozens of people out walking — more than I ever recall seeing on the trail at once (one reason: it climbs a good 600 or 800 feet from the nearest parking areas, which are more than a mile from the top). We’ve had less than half an inch of rain this month, the month that’s usually the heart of the wet season.

Winter’s happening somewhere. Here and here and here. But not here where I am.

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Heat Wave

It was freakishly warm here today, meaning the warmest day on record for the date around most of the Bay Area. Temperatures in the 70s were common. A few places got into the 80s. I remember years where I’ve waited well into April before we’ve had our first 70-degree day.

Now, it’s nearly midnight. Still 65 degrees. The warm northeasterly is still blowing across the hills and down across the flatlands. Not like any January night I remember in these parts.

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Berkeley Frost

Oh, sure: You, wherever you are to the north or east of the San Francisco Bay shoreline, you have your cold snaps, your big old snowstorms, and your drifts. All that’s enough to make you forget how the cold season started some frosty morning a few months ago. Here on the Bay, frost happens every so often in the dead of winter, on some clear morning after a storm has passed. This morning was one of those frosty mornings for us to come out of our uninsulated bungalows and think that we’re in some kind of wintry solidarity with folks on the Columbia, near the East River, or on the shores of Lake Michigan and Lake Erie.

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Seventy

The principal memory from last weekend: the constant cold rain from late morning to midnight Saturday. It marked the end of about four weeks of storms coming in off the Pacific. Depending on the weather reporting station you checked, we got anywhere between ten and a half and thirteen inches of rain during that span. A foot of rain in a month is a lot any way you figure it. It started clearing up Sunday, though, and Monday and Tuesday were sunny and about 60 degrees. Except for a foggy start to Wednesday, that’s the way the whole week was.

But yesterday, yesterday was something. We woke up late and took The Dog out for a walk around 9:30 in the morning. The chill was already off the air. We spent much of the afternoon attacking the big tracts of weeds in the back yard; at our place, anyway, the temperature pushed 70. It stayed warm even after the sun went down. Mosquitoes appeared for scored the first bites of the season.

Today, much like yesterday. Looking at the forecast, we’ve got a week of dry weather coming; maybe that portends a break for people back east, though I know there are storms slipping down toward the center of the country from the Pacific Northwest. I don’t count on the dry weather lasting, and in the rhythm of our climate one starts hoping that the storms will be back to build up our summer water supply (stored in the Sierra snows). The break is nice, though.

On into tonight, which will be a late one for the fogies. We’re going off to a show at The Fillmore–the first time I’ve ever gone there. It’s a Christmas present from one of the kids, and a nice end to the weekend.

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Chicago Sky

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I’ll say it pre-emptively, so you don’t have to: Enough with the cloud pictures already.

OK, sure. But first, you have to figure out a way to stop days like today in Chicago from happening. A long-advertised severe weather front moved through in the late afternoon after hours of building southwest winds. I was up in Evanston, a couple miles west of the lake, when I saw what appeared to be a huge thunderstorm in the south and southwest; it looked like it wouldn’t make it as far north as I was, so I shot a few pictures at the park where I was stopped, then got in the car to drive back to my dad’s place. But when I got in the car, I turned on the radio and heard that the storm I was seeing was a severe thunderstorm moving across the middle of Chicago (with wind gusts as high as 74 mph; an example, I think, of a type of severe thunderstorm front called a derecho). Since the storm seemed to be passing safely by, I decided to drive out to the lake shore and watch it move out across the water.

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To dispel any suspense: I didn’t wind up in the middle of the tempest. But the people out there on the beach got a good view of the storm at a distance, along with what I’d call, if I were given to such outbursts, a truly wondrous display of light and color in the huge cloud mass that sprawled across the shoreline.

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On the Bike: Weather Edition

Tomorrow’s event, part two of the qualifying series for this August’s Paris-Brest-Paris exercise in transatlantic self-punishment, is a 300-kilometer ride. That’s 188 miles in universally recognized American distance units. We’ll start at the Golden Gate Bridge at 6 a.m., ride up through the interior valleys of Sonoma County to the town of Healdsburg, head out along the Russian River to the townlet of Jenner, then ride down the coast highway to Point Reyes Station, where we’ll swing inland to go back to the bridge (the foregoing provided for those who want to keep score at home). Based on past experience, this will be something I’ll be doing well into the evening.

The hard part is: rain. The sky is clear out there now. But for the past two or three days, the forecast has predicted rain and, for the return trip on the coast, headwinds. I’ve been meaning to write a little something on the blessing and curse of modern weather forecasting for the modern bicycle rider. By which I mean: The blessing is that the sort of forecasting that’s possible today, along with tools like Doppler radar and satellite water-vapor imagery, can give you a pretty clear idea of what you’re riding into and when; the curse is that you become the prisoner of a prospective and freely revised reality.

Weather forecasting is highly model driven, meaning that a bunch of unimaginably fast and powerful computers are applying sophisticated mathematical models to the wealth of weather data pouring in from all over the globe; when the machines finish their model-assisted number crunching, they spit out a picture of the way the world will look in 12 and 24 and 48 hours and so on. Then forecasters take these visions of the world as the models predict it and try to turn them into forecasts. Except: Sometimes the forecasters are confronted with two or three or six conflicting, or at least significantly varying, takes on what tomorrow and the day after and the day after that, ad infinitum, will look like. Then the humans have to do something that is a cross between highly educated guesswork and astrology: often, based on observations about which models have “verified” recently, they’ll make a prediction based on a compromise reading of models or just lean on the model that seems the most trustworthy in a given set of circumstances.

The curse, more specifically, is that we can all look at the developing forecasts, read the forecasters’ reasoning, even consult the raw data if we think we can handle that. Which means, in the end, we don’t get a minute’s rest thinking about whether it will rain, how much it will rain, how awful the headwinds will be out on the road. On balance, it seems like it would be simpler, and much more peaceful for the soul, to just look out the window before you get on your bike. But that would be much too simple and would fail to make the best use of our high-speed Net connections.

Time for bed now, right after I check the forecast and the radar again.

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Today’s Frost Report

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Down to freezing again overnight (yes, I’m conscious that most of the vegetation on which the frost forms here is green, not Northern Hemisphere winter brown). Those little crystals of ice? They’re called spicules (according to the OED, which refers to them as spicula, a spicule is “1. A sharp-pointed or acicular crystal or similar formation … b. esp. A formation of this nature caused by the action of frost”).

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Me & the Weather Guy

TomskillingAs avid readers of this space are aware, I’m an admirer of Chicago weatherperson Tom Skilling. His work on WGN has always seemed to be well ahead of the curve in terms of graphic presentation. His presentation is fact-rich and thorough (a new wrinkle in coverage of the winter storm hitting Illinois tonight: a discussion of pavement temperatures), yet understated. And his on-air material is supplemented by the best full page of weather I’ve seen in any newspaper, much of which is reproduced in the WGN Weather Center Blog. Typically, the blog includes an evening post written after WGN’s night news show; the posts usually carry Skilling’s name. The other night I was reading one, and was struck that the head of the station’s weather operation was actually taking the time to put out a last thoughtful and well-crafted message before shutting down for the night. I’ve been in other TV newsrooms, and I can tell you that that’s pretty unusual (and I admit I half-suspect someone else on the team drew the short straw for this duty).

(For comparison’s sake, this is what the San Francisco Chronicle passed off as weather knowledge on Thursday: a 50-word blurb from one of the KPIX weatherpersons on why you can see your breath when it’s cold out: “…When your breath leaves your warm body and comes in contact with cold air, it cools rapidly. As it cools, the invisible water vapor condenses into tiny water droplets, similar to to droplets in a cloud or fog.” That’s actually one of the more provocative treatises the page has delivered recently.)

I wrote Skilling a note telling him how much I like the stuff he and his group put out–yeah, drooling fan mail to a meteorologist. Surprise of surprises–though not as amazing as the time Kate wrote to Mr. Rogers and got back a beautiful two-page letter that bore all the signs of having actually come from Fred himself–Skilling wrote back to thank me. Must not get a lot of email from Berkeley. Made my day; or at least part of it.

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