Category Archives: Weather

The smoke sucks.

Another day of smelling it, sore eyes, a nagging small cough.

Even with that, while it’s not great here, it’s far, FAR worse in so many other places in California, Oregon, and Washington.

Not to mention the actual, you know, FIRES, that are killing dozens, could kill thousands, and are destroying entire towns and literally millions of acres of forests and grasslands.

But the special effects… WOW!

A little orange from all of the smoke, a little grey from some of the clouds.

A little pink from all of those fine particulates in the atmosphere.

The planet spins, the sun sets, only to rise again tomorrow. No matter how bad we mess things up, or how many stupid decisions we make.

Onward.

Yesterday I had pictures of afternoon clouds, the first we’ve seen in weeks and weeks.

These are the clouds from dusk yesterday, just before it gets so dark that you can’t get the camera to autofocus on them. The color gradients are fantastic as the cloud layers lower down are grey, in shadow, while the layers higher up are still catching the odd sunbeam just as the sun disappears.

Today, as predicted, we had 103° here, with temps as high as 109° up in the Central Valley and in the mountains where the brush fires are burning.

And also as predicted, the relative humidity has dropped back down into the teens and the wind has picked up. For tomorrow it’s supposed to be even hotter, with no let up in sight. Bad, bad news for those on the front lines fighting the fires.

What that also means is power shortages as everyone who has air conditioning has it cranked up to eleven. Already tonight Pacific Gas & Electric up in Northern California and Southern California Edison down here are instituting rolling blackouts. A quarter million folks at a time will lose power for an hour or so, then the next group, then the next…

So far we haven’t heard any notices of rolling blackouts from LA Department of Water & Power, but we have to assume they’re coming. If you’re like me and on the computer (or multiple computers) all day long, remember the cardinal rule – save early and often!!

What’s been great for comet watching and ISS watching has been an almost total and complete lack of clouds for months.

Not today. We woke up to it being gloomy and grey, with scattered showers. (We didn’t see a drop.)

Apparently it’s the leftovers from Hurricane Elida, churning as a Category 2 storm off of Cabo San Lucas, a thousand miles to our south.

By afternoon the gloomy part had given way to white, puffy, happy little clouds from horizon to horizon.

And humidity. Something that we don’t have a lot of, but were grateful for today. There are several large fires forty to sixty miles to our east and north, right on the edge of the Los Angeles metro area, and the humidity helps keep the fire from spreading so quickly.

Those clouds on the horizon are neither white, puffy, happy, or in fact, water. That’s smoke.

Tomorrow and into the weekend it promises to dry back out, kick up the winds, and push up into triple digits. Hang on to your hats.