August was all about fog

Here's a satellite image of how it rolls in overnight, fills the bay, gets over some of the hills.

Below: Taken at Marin Headlands, looking SW.

The fog can't quite get over the 1000 ft. hills, but it can sneak in at sea level,

the Golden Gate is to the left.

http://www.sfgate.com/news/article/fog-San-Francisco-Bay-Area-Outside-Lands-weather-11748551.php#photo-13671134

A few days it backed off, we got some nice relief.

It almost looked like it might rain... but no such luck.

Weather out west is largely tied to elevation, and it's effect

on whatever is coming in off the ocean.

Hills and mountains squeeze the air mass.

It snows at higher elevation, it rains lower down.

The peaks of mountains surrounding Death Valley are always snow covered.

At the bottom of the valley, it can be hotter than hell. Literally.

Shot from Dante's view, looking NW at sunrise.

But not always - there' been a very persistent hi pressure system

in the four corners area, when it expands westward, 

the natural air conditioning of fog stops working. Like now:

What will fall bring us? Ocean currents creating fog start to shift, fog backs off, September

and October can be the hottest months here at the coast.

I'll be sittin' here in front of my Mac, in boxer shorts, 

Canon Powershot at the ready.

Who knows what tomorrow may bring?!

Summer Fog! ..and one stunning sunset...

6/21 - There was one stunning sunset in SF:

http://www.sfgate.com/living/article/Bay-Area-Instagrammers-lose-their-minds-over-8314424.php

..... not so stunning just a few miles north, where i am.

I am looking for something truly different, like this:

Here's one excellent link:

https://www.yahoo.com/news/chasing-stormy-skies-161030547/photo-chasing-the-stormy-skies-1467130347435.html

Here's some nice cirrus, 6/16:

(A little something to break up the monotony of totally blue skies.)

Sat. 7/9 - By 1PM,  low clouds/fog starts advancing inland - a cool breeze blows in my window.

Love that natural air conditioning! This continues thru the month, it is a bit of a mild rollercoaster - the 7 day forecast looks like this:

Sunday 7/24

Wasn't expecting any good fog, just wanted to cool off a bit from San Rafael's 85º afternoons.

Satellite image showed some fog, but offshore, not thru the Gate, or on onto the land. The Nat'l weather service text display product said the marine layer was shallow, about 1000 ft., which is ideal for photos at MH.

The NWS was right, the sat. image was wrong! - by the time i got there (an hour later, fog doesn't usually move that fast), it was doing my favorite thing, pouring thru the gate but burning off by alcatraz & struggling to get over the coastal hills (only 1000 ft high), burning off in marvelous mystical wispy strands.

The bus schedules had changed recently, but i was in luck, got one to the GGB as soon as i arrived at the transit center, and the one back to MH as soon as i got to the GGB.

Fog seems to have this pattern about it here - it burns off/backs off for a while in the AM, then early PM sometime it starts moving back in, and can overwhelm the headlands w/ pea soup, very cold. That's what it did today, with a vengeance. I waited for the bus at the last stop east before going over the bridge, and it was all i could do to stand up it was so windy. And the wait for the bus back to Marin county was loooong, traffic across the bridge was moving at a snail's pace. 

But the pix were worth it.

'Ah'll be back' as the terminator said most famously.

August was a rather uneventful month...

.....with a few exceptions:
A prismatic event - remember that cirrus clouds are really ice, and as such, like glass, they fracture light beams:

And some early AM fog burning off, it's always magical, ever changing.
Helps one wake up easily, slowly, softly.

But the real topic this time round?.......I took in some marvelous fog, at the end of the July 4 weekend, 7/6.
'I bought the ticket, & took the ride' as Hunter Thompson has written... via Golden Gate transit and SF Muni to Marin Headlands, hoping for some some photogenic fog. I got my wish.
I go to a particular area that I have found to be most interesting for fog.
I start at the last bus stop before the bus goes over the hill, into the next/northern valley, there is a semi-circle of hills that block the fog when it is only 800+ ft. high off the ocean, the hills are on the north, west and east - the south opens to the ocean.
This topography is what makes it interesting, it forces the fog to do interesting things, spill over the hills, wrap around them, and burn off in magical ways.
Here's the topographic map:

You can see how the north, west, and east are blocked off, to almost 900 ft elevation... but the south? ..is open to sea level.
The imbalance in elevation is what makes things happen.

Here's the results:

Here's some links worth your time:

http://www.livescience.com/47225-california-wildfire-fire-clouds-fighter-jet-photos.html
http://www.livescience.com/34024-gallery-weird-clouds.html
 http://abc7news.com/weather/gps-devices-find-huge-water-loss-in-west/275920/
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2731091/California-s-vanishing-lakes-Before-photos-reveal-shocking-shriveling-effect-state-s-devastating-drought-decades.html

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 Niño 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.....

Summer Fog

The next few posts will be... foggy. Literally. Summertime on the California coast is a very interesting time, fog rolls in off the ocean, hits the land, and very interesting things happen, never the same way twice, it's always a battle of sorts w/ the air mass over the land. Weather forecasts can be monotonous - "60's at the coast, 70's and 80's around the bay, 90's inland. Fog moves inland overnite, clearing to the coast by midday" - 30 degrees difference in less than 30 miles. Here's a webcam view from the east bay:

Yes that's the top of one tower of the GG Bridge in the center.

And a satellite image:

http://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Weather-as-varied-as-the-people-Land-and-fog-2900468.php

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

http://www.life-in-the-bay.com/2011/02/14/microclimates-in-san-francisco/

http://www.princeton.edu/~achaney/tmve/wiki100k/docs/Microclimate.html

"Lani's fog blog" - how amusing, the fog inspires a blog!
By Lani Chin, San Francisco resident, Ohio State alum, aspiring 10-pin bowler, cheap eats foodie and film lover with a memory elephants would envy:
http://lanifogblog.blogspot.com/2008/06/sf-bay-areas-microclimates.html

http://thatswhatshesaidboston.com/2013/06/bay-area-betty-sfs-microclimates-are-exhausting/

I've found the Marin Headlands to be one of the most interesting places to observe and photograph fog.

Without further ado, here's the views.

 

 

 

Every once in a great while, you find yourself in the *purr-fect* place at the right time.

That's what keeps me coming back.

If you interpret the 'sky' to be 'anything above your head' this one qualifies.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2013/07/transient-luminous-events/

Otherworldly Photos Capture Mysterious Phenomena in Upper Atmosphere

In the blink of an eye, an enormous bright red light flashes above a thundercloud, spreading energetic branches that extend five times taller than Mount Everest and look like jellyfish tendrils and angel's wings.

These mysterious phenomena are known as Transient Luminous Events (TLEs), and are usually invisible to the naked eye because they happen on millisecond timescales, too fast to be seen. They occur between 50 to 100 kilometers above the ground, a long-ignored area of the atmosphere that is too high for aircraft but too low for satellites to investigate. There, the thin air interacts with strong electrical fields to ionize molecules and create arcing plasmas."

If you haven't seen this one yet, you really should:

http://abcnews.go.com/blogs/headlines/2013/07/the-big-cloud-project-by-camille-seaman/

It's not all 'western' but it's too good to not mention.