Sunday, June 1, 2014

Another month... no rain

May 5-7 Ferocious wind!
The last few days of early May the wind has been ferocious, i mean totally ass kicking 'i have a hard time standing up' kinda wind. But the wind is marvelous, it's invisible but...so affecting, & cleansing in a way.
Will there be any more rain this spring? I am sure as shit not holding my breath, rain happening in May or June would be rather unusual.
Since then? It's just been blue skies or light cirrus all the way:


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cirrus_clouds

An excellent page and a very loooong one, i will give you a very edited explanation:

A cloud is "a visible mass of liquid droplets or frozen crystals made of water or variouschemicals suspended in the atmosphere above the surface of a planetary body..."

Cirrus clouds are definitely frozen water, since  they are at high altitudes w/ rather low temperatures.
Generally they form at anywhere between 13,000 and feet up.
They also form on other planets: Mars, Jupiter, Uranus and maybe Neptune.

The ice crystals in cirrus clouds have different shapes, as well as different sizes, which determine how they behave and look.

There are four distinct species: castellanos, fibratus, spissatus and unicus.
Examples:
Fibratus

Cirrocumulus


I think this one is 'unicus'... i think.

There is certainly no lack of websites devoted to clouds:

(good information here, terrible web design:
http://www.clouds-online.com/

http://cloudappreciationsociety.org/

They also have various optical effects, like colorful circumhorizontal arcs:



And what are called sun dogs, which is a circle around the sun w/ a halo of a sort, with flares at two particular angles from the sun.

 
Keep in mind that these clouds are ice particles, which act like mini prisms - remember the Pink Floyd album cover?


....that can split light into a spectrum.


On other planets, cirrus are not made from water vapor but from much nastier stuff like methane and ammonia.
There now, I have condensed what was 5 pages of print-out and three pages of footnotes into an easily digestible nugget for someone who is not a scientist. A lot of this wikipedia page is for scientists.

One exception to the recent blue skies and cirrus:

May 18 Sunday - weather forecast is for a low pressure system to spin off from the Pacific, maybe give us some thunderstorms in the next few days.

May 19 Monday 2 PM - there's some great cirrus, but no sign of rain.

By 4 PM? there's some changes a-brewin'...



But it all totally crapped out, no rain, no nothin'.
I've said a thousand times, weather forecasting is the only job you can have and be wrong 50% of the time, and still have a fucking job.

As for the drought? SF Chronicle has what continues to be a good page:

http://www.sfgate.com/drought/

here's a few recent hi-lites:

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/California-drought-Sierra-snowpack-is-barely-5446649.php

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/California-drought-Jobs-money-dry-up-in-farm-5431129.php

Tioga Road in Yosemite National Park will open for the season at noon Friday (May 9)
Since 1980, this ties for the earliest opening with 1987, when the road was also opened on May 2. Last year the road opened on May 11. The average opening date is May 27, in time for Memorial Day Weekend.
Tioga Road, bounded on both sides by State Highway 120, is the popular crossing of the Sierra Nevada that tops out at 9,943-foot Tioga Pass and leads east down to Mono Lake.
http://blog.sfgate.com/stienstra/2014/05/01/yosemites-tioga-pass-to-open-noon-friday/

http://news.yahoo.com/water-flows-uphill-maybe-california-105659086.html

"The odds are increasing that an El NiƱo is in the works for 2014—and recent forecasts show it might be a big one."

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/04/07/el_nino_2014_2015_forecasts_show_it_could_grow_into_a_monster.html

http://news.yahoo.com/el-nino-back-know-2014-version-222327719.html

A Nice map of possible el nino effects:
http://io9.com/a-map-of-where-el-nino-will-strike-around-the-world-1579079407

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/As-Central-Valley-fog-disappears-fruit-nut-5496710.php

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/05/_10_percent_of_california_s_water_goes_to_almond_farming.html

http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2014/03/drought_crisis_arizona_may_be_california_s_future.html

A Nice side effect of the drought:

http://www.sfgate.com/science/article/The-coast-is-clear-Water-good-at-most-Bay-Area-5498567.php

Next post, I'll be thinkin' in summer mode, and that means fog. Maybe I'll shoot some, if not, i have many years worth of images. Like say... these two:






Let's see what next month brings.....


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