Author Topic: Highlights from Northern California's 2015-16 rainy season  (Read 25735 times)

elagache

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Rain was nice while it lasted (Re: Northern CA's 2015-16 rainy season.)
« Reply #30 on: February 20, 2016, 10:31:04 PM »
Dear WeatherCat west coast drought watchers,

The much vaunted California rain event of this past week indeed exceeded the forecasts.  We were expecting 0.25" to 0.50" of rain we ended up getting 0.91" of rain (23.1 mm.)  In addition there was high winds, hail, and thunderstorms greater than had been originally forecast.

Alas, a weaker storm forecast for Friday didn't hold together as well as the models had previously suggested.  As a result, we received only a moistening of 0.03" of rain.  Still any rain was welcome because of what had preceded it:



Since February is the second wettest month typically, this is seriously bad news which is dramatically illustrated by the difference from normal rainfall graph:



The current forecasts are looking extremely bleak for an additional rainfall before the end of the month.  So for the moment California is back into a serious bout of drought.

Oh well, . . . . Edouard

Blicj11

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Re: Highlights from Northern California's 2015-16 rainy season
« Reply #31 on: February 21, 2016, 06:44:55 AM »
Nice to hear Edouard. That same storm dropped 6 inches of snow in our area.
Blick


elagache

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Some signs of change (Re: Northern CA's 2015-16 rainy season.)
« Reply #32 on: February 21, 2016, 10:19:43 PM »
Dear Blick and WeatherCat drought watchers,

Nice to hear Edouard. That same storm dropped 6 inches of snow in our area.

I'm glad that you received some help in recouping some of the snow lost in the record heat.  The California weather blog cautions against complete gloom and doom:

http://www.weatherwest.com/

In addition, for the first time since January, the medium range models now forecast two storms (if both weak) in a row. The first is expected for the upcoming weekend and a second one into the following week.  Finally the Climate Predication Center is signaling a change back to a more wet weather pattern.  We'll just have to see.

For now, we are expecting another very warm week.  I'll have to start watering before the end of it and I might be forced to get the lawn mower out of winter storage.  Bummer dude it is still February!

Cheers, Edouard

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Re: Some signs of change (Re: Northern CA's 2015-16 rainy season.)
« Reply #33 on: February 22, 2016, 03:56:41 PM »
... I might be forced to get the lawn mower out of winter storage.

This is one of the reasons we moved into the mountains. No lawn, ergo no mowing required. I gave my lawn mower to my son-in-law when we moved up here 8 years ago. One of the best days of our lives.
Blick


elagache

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CPC backing off on wet. (Re: Northern CA's 2015-16 rainy season.)
« Reply #34 on: February 23, 2016, 12:51:51 AM »
Dear Blick and WeatherCat drought watchers,

... I might be forced to get the lawn mower out of winter storage.

This is one of the reasons we moved into the mountains. No lawn, ergo no mowing required. I gave my lawn mower to my son-in-law when we moved up here 8 years ago. One of the best days of our lives.

Rub it in will ya'! . . . .

Alas, the National Weather Service Climate Prediction Center is starting to back-off on the promise of El Ni?o returning.  The 6-10 and 8-14 day outlook is now only for normal precipitation instead of above normal.  Also the storm for this coming weekend is once more fading away.  The demon ridge of high pressure continues to do its damage . . . .

Oh well, . . . . Edouard  :(

dfw_pilot

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Climate
« Reply #35 on: February 23, 2016, 12:53:57 PM »
Quote from: elagache
Climate Prediction Center is starting to back-off on the promise of El Ni?o returning
The climate prediction center might be wrong?? Gasp! They've been right so far on global warming, so they must be right on the weather forecasts 5-10 days in advance, right?

I'll crawl back into my hole . . .
A clear conscience is a great pillow.


elagache

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Waffling on whether climate change is already happening. (Re: Climate)
« Reply #36 on: February 23, 2016, 11:30:13 PM »
Dear dfw and WeatherCat weather observers,

Quote from: elagache
Climate Prediction Center is starting to back-off on the promise of El Ni?o returning
The climate prediction center might be wrong?? Gasp! They've been right so far on global warming, so they must be right on the weather forecasts 5-10 days in advance, right?

Well sadly you might have touched upon an extremely inconvenient truth about climate change.  Depending on who you read, some climate experts insist that temperatures are rising, but the climate hasn't been destabilized - yet.  Others insist the climate is already changing.  The latter point is extremely important for situations like the western drought.  If we are observing a new stable feature of winters along the west coast of north America, then it will never rain as much as we are normally expecting.  The new normal amount of rainfall is well below what is necessary to maintain the population densities we have in places like California and Arizona.  Sooner or later we'll exhaust our water reserves and that's it, literally millions of people will have to be relocated else where.  It isn't as dramatic as some other natural disasters, but it would make the current European refugee crisis look like a picnic.  Considering how much food is grown in California, the effects on the United States and the world could be catastrophic.

Right now I'm having a living nightmare.  The rains have stopped just as they have for several year in a row.  This change in the western US winter weather pattern is painfully stable.  I'm just a layman, but this sure looks like new stable feature of the climate - climate change is already here and is hurting people and businesses.

Not to start a politic battle, but there is strong movement to try to prevent climate change by throttling human produced CO2 emissions.  A lot of money is supposed to be spend on that agenda.  In California, attempt to expand our water reserves have run into a brick wall created by the environmental movement and the Democratic leadership in the state house.  If what I'm observing is really happening - it is already too late.  California and other western states are on the brink of a cataclysm. 

I've been extremely critical of the quality of climate research.  Way too much of it has been focused on the narrow and dubious question of is global temperatures actually rising.  Even with my now distant course on thermodynamics that took in college, I remember that temperature is nothing more than the average kinetic energy of the gas modules forming the atmosphere.  More energetic gas molecules will behave differently, so as a first approximation, any change in temperature should have a direct effect on climate.  Clearly there must be feedback relations that result in climate stability, but exactly what are these feedback relations and exactly how stable they are? That's been all part of the black magic of the climate science.  We have been asked to trust them instead of getting what we should expect from science - predictions we all can personally observe as accurate or not.

When such demands are made, we get a lot of hand waving about how hard prediction turns out to be.  Yet, the National Weather Service Climate Predication Center is able to predict this high pressure ridge over periods of 2 weeks.  What do they know and why aren't they telling us what this means over the long term?

I fear that more is known about our predicament than is being made public.  I fear there is a mix of denial and political correctness that is promoting "pie in the sky" responses when we might be facing a humanitarian crisis in as little as 1 year.

Every day that passes without rain around here, I get more and more scared . . . 

I'll crawl back into my hole . . .

I sure wish I could find a safe hole to escape from this one . . .

Edouard

dfw_pilot

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Climate Hoax
« Reply #37 on: February 24, 2016, 12:38:22 AM »
I agree. The Earth's climate is obviously changing, but like you say, more drought in California is probably due to the millions of people who have moved there over the last 100 years. I liken it to when people claim that through climate change, there are more hurricanes. Really? Based on what information? I say it's only because there are billions more people on the planet and many of those live closer to the sea to experience them that it seems like there are more. Sadly, California has spent billions of dollars it does not have to fund things like embryonic stem cell research. Nothing notable has come form that stem cell research. Meanwhile, the real problem of no water, the problem of the here and now, isn't fixed. Moonbeam hasn't spent money to build aqueducts or de-salinization plants, or a project to bring Pacific Northwest water down to the basin where people badly need it - today.

I'll preface all this by saying I believe that the Hoax that is Climate Change (or is it Global Warming, Al?) is the greatest scam ever to play out in human history. It has even become its own religion to many. It has never really been about saving the planet, but about destroying freedom, dismantling Capitalism, and handing over nearly all control to the state.

I agree wholeheartedly that our job as humans is to tend the garden and we should treat our home with care and respect. But sadly, the climate change movement has become riddled with politics, to the point it can't be taken seriously today. There have been too many scandals, too many coverups of e-mails and data, and too much "green" money invested into the idea for it to be real science today. Big Climate Change has too much money wrapped up in it to be disavowed. Lots of good has come from the movement, like e-mail instead of mail, LED instead of incandescent, and on and on. The huge rub comes when the government tries to push agendas and pet projects like solar, long before the science is really ready (nasty CFL's anyone?). The answer is not more government regulation or meddling, but allowing the free market to decide these things, to let the free market determine winners and losers, not bureaucrats.

People, by nature, want to matter, or at least they want to feel like they matter. They feel like they matter when the do their part to save the planet from destruction by recycling or lowering their carbon footprint. It's a perfect way to perpetuate the myth of climate change, even though it only exists in computer models 50 years from now. We can't predict the weather in two weeks but 50 year climate models are correct? We only have data for a 100 year slice of the planet and think we can extrapolate that out and deem humans the problem? Much of North America was covered in ice, so yeah, climate change happens, but what caused the warming thousands of years ago? Was it evil oil (that comes from the earth)? People do matter, even if they don't know it. But in the climate change hoax, I'm afraid people have glommed onto the wrong ideas.

I love the quote: "There is no consensus in science." Even if 100% of climate scientists agreed doesn't make it so, just like if they all agreed the moon was made of blue cheese, their belief doesn't make it so. Upton Sinclair could have been thinking about future climate scientists when he said, "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."

dfw

(Now I'm really going to go back into my hole!)
A clear conscience is a great pillow.


elagache

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The paradox of "nature religion" (Re: Climate Hoax)
« Reply #38 on: February 25, 2016, 11:53:50 PM »
Dear dfw and WeatherCat social observers,

Not to be a dead horse, but I wanted to highlight two thing about your reply:

I agree. The Earth's climate is obviously changing, but like you say, more drought in California is probably due to the millions of people who have moved there over the last 100 years.

You are correct, but after all California is a democracy and people were aware that the water supply wasn't keeping up with the population growth.  But instead of rationally planning solutions to the water shortfalls, people soon broke down into the famous western water wars.

It is a troubling example of democracy enabling irrational behavior that ultimately people are paying for.

I'll preface all this by saying I believe that the Hoax that is Climate Change (or is it Global Warming, Al?) is the greatest scam ever to play out in human history. It has even become its own religion to many.

It is interesting that you also see environmentalism has been becoming a substitute for human religions.  This is a puzzle with two dimensions.  The people who embrace nature as a kind of religion nonetheless are rejecting traditional religions - why would they not reject nature worship as just as irrational?  If they experience a religious itch - isn't it proof enough there must something genuine about human spirituality?

At another level worshiping nature is a fool's errand.  Sure human find things that are grand, beautiful, inspiring and so on in nature, but do they exist to move us in such ways?  If you take cold scientific view: grandeur, beauty, inspiration exist within the human mind alone.  Sunrises like the one I've been photographing have occurred (presumably) for billions of years.  Borrowing from Jean Paul Sartre, if a sunrise happens, but there is nobody to appreciate it - is it beautiful?

Moreover, nature worship is a kind of trap within its freedom.  At some level it is like motherhood and apple pie - how could that go wrong?  Well, established religions would disagree.  Western civilization is founded on moral foundations like: thou shall not kill.  In nature, things kill each other all the time and that's natural.  Even species become extinct and humanity could suffer that fate with everything remaining natural.  Whether it is a lion or the Ebola virus, in truth nature is merciless.  Nature as revealed by our scientific understand of things is utterly without hope - as the current drought in California attests.

So there is something extremely peculiar about people trying to find a "back door" to scratch their religious itch.  It isn't the innocent practice people imagine it to be.

Edouard

xairbusdriver

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Re: Highlights from Northern California's 2015-16 rainy season
« Reply #39 on: February 26, 2016, 03:48:21 PM »
"Scams" are a favorite and personal topic of mine.<Mail Scam Alert.com>

<sermon>I think most conspiracy theorists put way too much intelligence and cooperativeness in other humans. From local school boards to the United Nations, we see examples of how hard it is to get even a consensus, much less a "plan" to do anything. [rolleyes2]

Saying that "scientific consensus doesn't make it true/correct" is accurate to a degree. But that is much different than saying a consensus proves a conspiracy. A "majority" of voters greats a "consensus" in the minds of those elected and no one would argue that that proves anything to be correct or even moral.

However, "science" operates much differently than any form of government. It's basic tenant is to question the results by any 'proofs' of a hypothosis. Any reported result must be tested by others to prove, by repeatable actions, that something is 'true'. And even then, it is said to be 'true' when using the available methods for testing. That's why previous 'proofs' or later rejected when more comprehensive methods became available. Some of the designers of the X-1 claimed it's supersonic flight 'proved' that swept wings were unnecessary! ;) What it really proved is that a brick can 'fly' if the engine is powerful enough! [lol] As far as I know, there are very few scientific "facts". All we have are repeatable results that support a hypothesis which can be changed as new information appears.

I have no problem agreeing that humans have affected the world's climate. We have certainly created problems for thousands of years in just about every thing else on this planet. I believe "Man" has dominion over this world, but that doesn't mean he has the wisdom to do what is best for it. The least we can do is conserve and protect what we have to the best of our abilities. Stop buying more food than you need, stop adding non-degradable plastic to the oceans... </sermon>

If everyone believed and behaved as I do...
we'd probably be extinct by now! [banghead]
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Those that use metric = #1 Measurement system
And the United States = The Banana system


elagache

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Da' sequel is HERE!! (Re: Northern CA's 2015-16 rainy season)
« Reply #40 on: March 07, 2016, 12:08:42 AM »
Dear WeatherCat western US drought watchers,

Well the promised front was . . . . an overachiever!!  Here is a summary of the notifications from my WC Storm Monitor AppleScript:



The peak rate was substantially greater than what my AppleScript sampled:



Unfortunately, I don't see any way to check on this, but a rainfall rate of 8.73" per hour (221.7 mm per hour) might well be a record for my station.

Here is the graph of rainfall:



We are at 2.60" (66mm) of rain for the total storm and are expecting another strong impulse this afternoon and tonight.

Later this week into the weekend is expected another series of strong storms.

So it would appear that the California rainfall spigot is definitely back on!  I made a check of the neighborhood and beyond some flooding and one large branch being down, everything looked okay.  About a mile from my house a tree came down and took out power according to a local police report.  All in all, not too bad given the severity of this storm.  Nonetheless with more storms coming, California may be in for too much of a good thing!  [thunder]

Stay tuned!

Cheers, Edouard  [cheers1]


xairbusdriver

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Re: Highlights from Northern California's 2015-16 rainy season
« Reply #41 on: March 07, 2016, 12:12:05 AM »
At least too much too fast... Should help fill some reservoirs but probably won't help the water table. Remember, there's a black cloud inside every silver lining! [blush]
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dfw_pilot

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Funny
« Reply #42 on: March 07, 2016, 01:15:02 AM »
Quote from: xairbusdriver
Remember, there's a black cloud inside every silver lining!

LOL!
A clear conscience is a great pillow.


Blicj11

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Re: Highlights from Northern California's 2015-16 rainy season
« Reply #43 on: March 07, 2016, 07:41:54 PM »
We got 5 inches of wet snow when that storm hit northern Utah. Keep 'em coming.
Blick


elagache

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Photos of storm damage (Re: Northern CA's 2015-16 rainy season )
« Reply #44 on: March 07, 2016, 11:04:04 PM »
Dear X-Air, dfw, Blick, and WeatherCat drought watchers,

Remember, there's a black cloud inside every silver lining! [blush]

Speaking of da' devil . . . . 

There was some serious storm damage.  Here is a photo of that tree that feel down and took out power lines on Saturday night:



Here is the other side of the road that was blocked:



You can see in the upper left corner of the photo the power lines that had been taken down.  Finally, here is a photo of a branch that fell down and blocked a neighbors driveway:



So indeed this isn't the sort of rain that would be preferred to end the drought.  However, compared to drought - well, any rain is better than none at all.

Cheers, Edouard