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.....

A little rain, not much drought relief.

At the very end of March/begining of April, we got some good storms, but the drought ain't over by any means, even though a few things bloomed, and the grass on hills is green and not brown.

The best part of storms is usually the 'back side', that is to say that after the front passes by what follows in it's wake are the most interesting clouds, all puffy and ragged, various kinds of cumulus.

 

Sometimes there are some killer showers in there - on one day, one of them passed thru and there was thunder, lightening, and rain and... hail!

 

Then 20 minutes later, the sun was out.

Mother nature is a most fickle and unpredictable bitch. The few shots (above) taken just minutes apart, from the 5th floor breezeway at my apt building...
after this passed the sky opened up.
Here's a few more 'back side of the storms'.

 

Since then? It's just been 'cirrus' all the way:

For the time being droughtwise, this is the story:

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

http://news.yahoo.com/totally-parched-100-california-drought-172950132.html

http://www.sfgate.com/news/science/article/Study-links-California-drought-to-global-warming-5427269.php

http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-las-vegas-drought-20140421,0,5098010.story#axzz2zWlFOVBp

Severe drought? California has been here before.
A thousand-year tree-ring study shows that deep droughts come with the territory.
Now the issue is how to deal with them.

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-me-drought-weakness-20140223,0,6503044.story#ixzz2uAM10o7


On long term prospects for drought relief?...
none really........ but hey! some potentially good news on the horizon:

"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

I remember the last El Nino in 1997 ( I was living in SF, on 12th Ave just north the Golden Gate park), it was a monster!, it rained so hard that it set off car alarms on a regular basis, several times nightly.

Of course this much rain would be a blessing... but also a curse:

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2014/02/24/california_s_rainiest_week_in_more_than_two_years_will_bring_mudslides_floods.htm

Here's a few 'weather' links:

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

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/lmk/?n=cloud_classification

http://www.theweatherprediction.com/clouds/

As an amateur weather forecaster, one thing I can tell you about weather in California, and perhaps much of the rest of the West is... it's all about elevation.

Here's a couple of shots, weather coming over mountains.

 

Hi/low pressure systems come in off the ocean, and hit hills and mountains - initially 2000+ feet high, then there's the central valley, a bit of relief, then many more much bigger mountains called the Sierras.
All those changes wring out the clouds in various ways. You can stand at the lowest point in Death Valley in the middle of the summer, it can be 110 degrees... and there is still snow on the (4000+ ft) mountains that surround DV.
The world is more wonderous and marvelous than we can imagine.

One small nugget of wisdom i came across recently?

"Enjoy life - this is not a rehearsal"

Put that one in your pipe, 'and smoke it', so to speak.