Howdy WeatherCat fans,
Here is a kind of extreme weather of an usual sort that I thought folks might find interesting.
We are having one of those autumn hot weather events which are analogous to Southern California's Santa Ana winds. In this case, the mechanism is slightly different and is apparently disturbing the weather forecasters. There is a ridge of high-pressure sitting off of the coast not too far from San Francisco and it is compressing the air on top of us. However, the normal wind pattern under such conditions (in particular an off-shore flow,) isn't happening.
In the hot weather I never sleep as well, so I was up a bit early - well before dawn. When checking the Vantage Pro-2 console, I saw something very surprising: the daily evapotranspiration value was already 0.01":
That meant that the ambient heat and very low humidity had already removed 0.01" (0.25 mm) of moisture from grass (according to The Penman-Monteith equation.)
Somehow, I thought that at the very least plants would get some relief during the pre-dawn hours, but here is a concrete example of how demanding an arid environment can be on plants.
Does any WeatherCat user in a desert environment have an even more extreme example?
Cheers, Edouard