Category Archives: Weather

March 2, 2024 · 22:00

Sunset – March 02nd

I was fortunate this evening to get a quick heads up from a good friend that the sunset going on outside at the moment was “epic.”

She wasn’t wrong! It had been vascillating between damp, showers, rain, and downpours all day, but being back in “damp” mode (it’s raining again now) meant that some sunlight was getting through.

Then, about two minutes later, these spectral vapors just materialized out of thin air.

The air was saturated with moisture, cool, and apparently right on the edge of condensation into clouds.

Some small eddy or disturbance, probably with a breeze coming up the canyon and getting some lift, cooling and spinning just a bit, caused these to puff into visibility.

A stray late sunset, pink and orange ray of sunlight found a hole and poked through like a spotlight, catching them against the dark background of the thicker, unlit clouds off in the distance.

Knowing what causes it doesn’t make it any less spectacular. (But all of those stupid wires!)

So I ran down the hill to the spot where I watch SpaceX launches out of Vandenberg, free from wires. Those couple of minutes cost me in terms of less color and sunlight, but the two wraiths were still lit.

Barely! Between the sunlight fading and the disturbance that had caused them dying out, they were vanishing, the visible moisture evaporating and being absorbed back into the air as equilibrium with the surrounding local atmosphere was reestablished.

And then it was gone. Almost – I caught just the slightest trace of color to the left of that palm tree crown. (And then I had to climb back up that hill to get home!)

EPIC! Indeed.

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Filed under Photography, Sunsets, Weather

March 1, 2024 · 22:57

Very Odd Clouds

I’m no meteorologist, but I look at clouds a lot and pay attention and I like to think I’ve got an above average grasp of the way things work, so when I see something new and different and odd I tend to pay attention. And take pictures.

I didn’t say I always take good pictures. But in this case I wasn’t sure how long the phenomenon would be stable and visible, so ignore the wires and the puffy clouds in the foreground, and look at the nine or ten horizontal, parallel (-ish) lines of clouds beyond, somewhere out over Ventura County.

Except for at airshows where there are multiple planes in formation burning smoke oil, I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything like this.

I actually considered at first that it might be from aircraft flying in formation, but the smoke trails there are never this thick.

After a couple of minutes it looked like a burst of high altitude winds started to sweep across part of the lines on the right side, disbursing and scattering the lines.

It’s still linear on the left (and further to the right, but it was tough to see through the foreground clouds) but in this middle section everything was getting mixed and smeared out across the sky.

Going to research this online is an adventure. First of all, searching for “clouds that look like plantation shutters” will get a psychotic and psychedelic AI essay that made *NO* damn sense at all. Totally wacko, and not in a good way.

Secondly, searching for “clouds in horizontal, parallel lines” is a little bit more productive. These are apparently “altostratus undulatus” clouds. They don’t seem particularly uncommon. Something about them this day made them stand out and grab my attention.

And I had a camera nearby!

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Filed under Photography, Weather

February 26, 2024 · 23:35

Clouds – February 26th

I didn’t think we were supposed to get more rain before next weekend – the forecast was for something like a 10% chance.

No one bothered to tell the rain that came through however.

Stupid, illiterate, uninformed rain! It was just as wet, however.

Time to reset the timers to keep the sprinklers off for another few days.

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Filed under Photography, Weather

February 24, 2024 · 20:48

Are You Going To Rain Or Not?

Ambivalent clouds.

Are you going to rain or not? The dark bottom part is raggedy and threatening, but the top isn’t so sure at all.

The top part wants to rise, go up to 10,000 or 20,000 feet, get icy and thin.

These guys over here already developed an altitude and they’re just blocking a touch of sun. (Eventually the lower, thicker clouds blew off toward Las Vegas and rained there.)

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Filed under Photography, Weather

February 23, 2024 · 22:48

Artifact Or Insight

The almost full moon is very, very bright through a thin layer of broken clouds.

It’s a well known phenomenon to get a 22º circle around the moon when it’s seen through a high layer of ice crystals, but I’m pretty sure the circular rainbows seen in these pictures are something different, even if they might be distantly related.

If that color is more or less true, these are more like rainbows. But I wonder if the effect is real, or an artifact of how the iPhone sensor is trying to record what it sees, and how the iPhone software tries to fiddle with what data gets recorded so that it looks “real.”

Granted, when you look at the moon like this, there appears to be a pale, colored ring. So does the iPhone enhance that to make visible what the human eye can only hint at? Does it give us an insight into the universe around us that our mere human senses can just barely register?

Or are the sensor and software trying to add 2 + 2 and  getting 37 because they’re pre-programmed to expect an answer in the high thirties (-ish)?

Reality is not what it used to be – and this is when I’m 100% cold sober!

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Filed under Astronomy, Photography, Weather

February 20, 2024 · 23:47

I’m Lichen It! Day Four

As I was hoping, with today’s ongoing rain, the green lichen on the ash tree just exploded with color again.

It also spread to the west side of the tree, where there had been only a dusting before.

On the east side it was much more prominent and thicker, also spreading up higher on the trunk.

On the south side – still no sign of any.

There’s one spot that has a large mat of material, unlike everywhere else where it’s broken up to match the cracks and breaks in the tree bark.

Here it’s filled in all of those cracks and become a solid mass. There’s also that orange-ish section off on the left.

Where the rest of it seems to be a couple of millimeters thick on the bark, here it looks like it’s double or triple that.

The wide view, showing how bright it’s gotten.

And the video view. You’ll also notice how hard it is to zoom in while not dropping the umbrella…

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Filed under Flowers, Photography, Video, Weather

February 16, 2024 · 21:48

Find The Hummer

There was a lot of bird activity going on today. Aside from the usual two dozen plus mourning doves looking for their daily handout and Little Bastard doing his finest whistling dive bomber routine to impress the ladies and the batches of house finches looking for a good place to make a nest under the porch eaves. Those are all just things that happen on days that end in “y.”

Early in the day I could hear red-tailed hawks (the sound that they use for “eagles” in all of the Westerns made since the invention of the talkies) but couldn’t see them. Then I spotted a couple of ravens circling above the neighbors’ houses, over the canyon down below. A few seconds later two red-tailed hawks burst up out of the canyon, screaming, followed by four other ravens with the two up high diving to join the attack. It’s like a biker gang fight in the sky.

I caught a big scrub jay trying to empty out the hummingbird feeder. I opened the door to the back yard and scared him off once, but at lunch time I noticed that the feeder which had a week’s worth of hummingbird food at breakfast was now empty, so I’m thinking I wasn’t too intimidating in the long run. (Story of my life…)

It was somewhat sunny and warm, which will be ending tomorrow as we get ready for another week or more of heavy rain, so I went out this afternoon and saw some fantastic clouds, contrails, and a bit of iridescence as the Sun shown through a high layer of clouds.

I also noticed in a second picture (below) that Little Bastard was keeping an eye on me. Or waiting for that scrub jay to come back. Could go either way.

Can you spot him?

He’s not very big.

But he’s loud.

Here he was perched.

When he’s flying around you can hear him from fifty feet away.

And when he’s doing that whistling dive bomber mating thing you can hear him from a lot further away than that.

Click on the picture.

Blow it up to full sized on your screen.

Where would you be hiding if you were a hummgbird, particularly a really territorial one that needed to survey your domain?

Ah, of course.

There he is.

Stay dry this weekend.

Don’t pick any fights with birds ten times your size.

Let the wookie scrub jay win!

I’ll refill the feeder.

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Filed under Birds, Critters, Photography, Weather

February 7, 2024 · 23:33

Random Old Photo – February 07th

I was looking for a random photo and I realized that I haven’t shared a panorama in forever. Time to fix that.

Click on it – I’m giving you the full-sized, uncompressed file here.

Central Park, seven and a half years ago.

(Still raining here, but I think we’re near the end of this storm. Probably another in a week or so – El Niño FTW!!)

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Filed under Panorama, Photography, Travel, Weather

February 6, 2024 · 23:39

North Side

I noticed something surprising with all of this rain. You know that big tree out in the back yard that you see all the time in my pictures?

It’s turned green.

It’s moss. I’m guessing that it’s always been there, but it’s normally dormant and dry — and brown.

I’m not a botanist, so it’s a total guess, pure speculation (if anyone actually knows, please chime in to confirm or correct), but being soaked for four days straight might have “activated” it finally.

I thought at first it might be a trick of the light. It hasn’t been sunny, or well illuminated, out here in days. Nope. There’s green stuff growing all over the bark.

And not just green stuff, but also what seems to be purple stuff as well. But in the end, I’m not 100% convinced on that. It could be that the “purple” is just the same old brown in bad lighting in contrast to the green stuff all around.

A google search for “purple moss” gives you a type of sea weed that’s sold as a food supplement, but no actual purple mosses, so that’s one strike.

For the record – all of this moss *IS* on the north side of the tree.

Long ago I learned (incorrectly) that moss grows only on the north side of trees, a trick you can use if you’re lost in the woods. It turns out that’s not true, moss is only more likely to grow on the north side of trees and rocks because it’s shadier and cool, and that’s only in the Northern Hemisphere. In the Southern Hemisphere… Well, let’s leave that as an exercise for the student.

 

 

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Filed under Curiosities, Photography, Weather

February 5, 2024 · 22:31

Soggy Squirrel

The closest official rainfall recording station to us is in Woodland Hills. Over the last 100 years or so, the average annual precipitation total is 15.96 inches.

The three-day total for this storm, through 19:00 tonight, is 11.05 inches. That’s 70% of a normal year‘s rain in three days.

We’re fine so far, as I expected. So is this guy, munching on one of the grapes that got tossed out there. (The ravens and towhees also like the grapes, while the juncos, finches, and mourning doves prefer the bird seed.)

There are plenty of places with some local street flooding, the freeways suck even more than usual, some schools closed, and so on. We closed our office for the day, which really isn’t a super huge deal since all but two or three people normally work from home anyway.

The winds haven’t been as bad as feared, at least here, which has helped limit the power outages. That was my major concern. Up on the Central Coast north of Ventura it’s been a different story.

Tomorrow and Wednesday there’s a good chance of a third wave moving through. Fingers crossed!

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Filed under Critters, Los Angeles, Photography, Weather