Of course, following rain spots in the shadows of the night, there are cool looking clouds lingering after the cold front moves through in the morning.
Category Archives: Weather
Rain Spot Shadows
It had started raining fairly hard this evening, so I was sprinting as best I could through the dark parking lot to get to my car. I had parked right under one of those odd lights we have on the parking lot roof, so when I jumped into the car and paused to catch my breath, everything was polka-dotted with moving, wiggling shadows, cast from the drops on the windshield and the light directly overhead. It was most pronounced on the bright, yellow sweater I was wearing. Sometimes I could see long, snake-like lines of shadow as groups of drops congealed into a critical mass and slid down the glass.
Filed under Photography, Weather
Heavy Surf
There’s a storm coming this weekend, our second big El Niño storm in SoCal. This time, one of the warnings that they’re repeating over and over is about some huge waves hitting the coast, further eroding the beaches, and in some cases the cliffs along the coasts. Many of these beaches and cliffs have very expensive houses and apartments and condos on them, so it’s not just news, it’s big news.
(For those of you not in SoCal, you’re not necessarily spared – this storm will head across the country toward the East Coast and pretty much repeat the blizzard of last week. If you’re in its path, stock up on milk and bread now! Or beer and Captain Crunch, whatever floats your boat.)
Anyway, all of the television stations of course have their fancy, high definition maps to tell us where the danger will be:
Image: KABC Television, Los Angeles
What’s wrong with this picture?
If it were ME making this graphic, I would have that lovely fuchsia band hugging the coastline a bit more. If you’re familiar with the Los Angeles region, you’ll see that their map has a High Surf Advisory all the way inland as far as Interstate 5. That means that places like downtown LA, Dodger Stadium, Hollywood, and Beverly Hills are all in danger of high surf, right?
Let me tell you, if the surf’s so bad that it’s going to be dangerous at Dodger Stadium (17 miles from the coast and at an elevation of 267 feet), they need to be evacuating twenty million people from Southern California, not showing us pretty, pink maps!
Oxnard in Ventura County? Ditto. The CAF hangar in Camarillo is just above our weather woman’s left wrist, but about five miles from the coast. I hope I don’t need my water wings this weekend. But they’re showing the warning area to go all the way back inland into the Ojai Valley and up into the mountains by Santa Paula and Fillmore.
Someone needs to go back to coloring school and learn to color closer to the lines!
Filed under Freakin' Idiots!, Los Angeles, Weather
Sunrise
When the alarm clock went off at 6AM and I turned on the local news, they were all talking about the amazing sunrise going on out there. I’ve done lots of sunsets, but sunrises are more rare. They happen so damn early!
It wasn’t bad, and you’ll notice that the tree silhouettes looking to the east are much different than the “usual” look to the west.
Then it started to get really bright and colorful.
Those guys and gals on the television were correct! (But so was I – it was really early!)
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
The First Beautiful Sunset Of 2016
Well, at least is the first beautiful one in Southern California.
It might also be a rare sight for a few days here. That El Niño thing appears to finally be targeting SoCal – the fifteen day forecast currently shows seven of those days with a 50% or greater chance of rain. After four solid years of serious drought we need the rain, but after four solid years of serious drought the ground is baked & hard & burned so any hard rain to start off will just run off and cause flooding and mudslides.
Welcome to SoCal, where the four seasons are Shaking, Burning, Flooding, and Boring!
Tonight I was getting ready to leave the CAF hangar in Camarillo just before sunset and saw the storm front moving in from the north and west.
On the hills at the north end of Camarillo, across the runway and the 101 Freeway, you can see bright flashes off of the windows of several houses that are lined up just right.
Our C-46, “China Doll.”
Looking back to the west from “China Doll,” three of our four hangars.
From the parking lot, just after the sun disappeared out over the Pacific.
Filed under CAF, Photography, Weather
Rainbow At Sunset
The Long-Suffering Wife, who knows me well and loves me and wants me to be happy, called on her way home from the office about a huge, bright rainbow.
Not only was it bright, but the secondary rainbow could be clearly seen outside of the primary arc.
There was a low layer of clouds that had moved in over the area and it was just starting to rain. The sun was setting in the west on the far side of this band of showers, allowing a few rays to peek through from beyond the rain clouds, creating the rainbow.
As the clouds were moving about and we got various paths and intensities of sunshine under the cloud deck, the rainbows would fade, brighten, fill in more of the arc, and then shrink back down again.
This close-up shows one of the coolest things to note about double rainbows – on the brighter, primary arc the blue and green are on the inside with red on the outside. On the lighter, secondary arc, this is reversed with red on the inside and blue on the outside.
I happened to glance back and saw the sunset behind me in the west was almost as spectacular as the rainbows in front of me in the east.
The only depressing part of the experience was noticing there’s a house up at the end of the block with its Christmas lights up and turned on already!! My Christmas light credentials are well established – every year we have more lights than the rest of the block combined. But at least I have the decency to wait until the Friday after Thanksgiving to start putting them up!
One last gasp with about 90° of arc and a dim secondary…
…while you can see the band of sunlight that found a way through the rain clouds to produce it…
…only to have it all fade to darkness as the planet kept on rotating, our location on it slipping past the terminator into night.
Thanks for the heads up, wife!!
Filed under Photography, Ronnie, Weather
Sun Dog & Halo
While leaving the CAF hangar yesterday I noticed a “sun dog” near the setting sun as it shone through a layer of high clouds that had moved in. I was in bright sunlight but could still see the little rainbow-colored patch, so I moved into the shadow of one of the new hangars to take a photo.
Once in the shadow, my eyes adjusted a bit to the lower light, and I noticed the full 22° halo around the sun.
Caused by the sunlight passing through high-altitude ice crystals, I could see an identical (but dimmer) ring around the moon later in the evening. But it was too dim for me to get a good picture.
Filed under Astronomy, CAF, Photography, Weather
Yesterday’s Clouds
Yesterday I ranted and lectured a bit about the storm clouds, flooding, lousy and unreliable weather radar apps, and where (in my case) you can get decent data.
Today I just figured I would show you some of those clouds. (You didn’t really think I was out there looking at them without grabbing a camera, did you?)
In the end, after we didn’t get a drop of rain despite the “BREAKING NEWS!” flash flooding thirty miles away in Boyle Heights, near downtown LA, only a few lacy, pink clouds were left with the first quarter moon.
Filed under Photography, Weather
On The Need For Accurate & Timely Data
With most of us carrying pocket-sized supercomputers (which also happen to have GPS, cameras, and phones built in) we’re all getting good at just popping open an app when we need to know something. Yeah, we all hear cautionary tales from time to time reminding us to take anything on the internet with a grain of salt. But how many of us understand the accuracy and quality of the data being given to us on our dedicated apps?
That became crystal clear today.
There were widely scattered showers in the area, the tail end of something out over the Four Corners area. We never got a drop in our neighborhood. However, a few days ago there were some disastrous mud slides which resulted in key highways still being closed five days later, dozens and hundreds of cars and trucks trapped and destroyed. This may well be a “warning shot” given the record El Niño which is developing in the Pacific Ocean and the region being at the tail end of a historic, four-year drought.
About 16:15 I was out with Jessie. There were some very pretty, threatening clouds overhead, but off to the east, toward downtown Los Angeles, a couple of HUGE thunderheads could be seen.
At 16:30, this popped up on The Weather Channel website. Notice the phrasing – “At 426 PM PDT…Doppler radar and automated rain gauges indicated heavy rain which will cause urban and small stream flooding,” and “…locations…include Long Beach, Downtown Los Angeles…Boyle Heights.”
Nothing saying this rain might be coming or that flooding was possible. The rain was happening now, observed on radar and other equipment, and flooding will happen in a specific set of places.
So I hit the icon on that Weather Channel website to look at the local radar and see where those big storms were. Were they moving my way? Should I have cleaned out those gutters yesterday instead of putting it off?
Wait – this radar picture was supposed to be from 16:28, when the alert at 16:26 said those big storms were over downtown LA and those other cities. Where are those storms on this map? (Yes, I double checked the settings to make sure the radar layer was enabled. Plus, if you zoomed out to see all the way from San Francisco to Albuquerque, you could clearly see storms out over the Colorado River into Arizona and Nevada.)
At 17:00 we turned on the television to watch the baseball game but instead saw this “BREAKING NEWS!” A helicopter over Boyle Heights (remember Boyle Heights? the NWS said there might be urban flooding in Boyle Heights) is showing water a couple of feet deep running through the streets and into yards.
It would sure appear that those big storms really, really were in the area. So why don’t they show up on the radar map that’s supposed to be a key tool for me to use to stay informed and prepared?
Okay, maybe it’s just the Weather Channel website that’s wonky. Let’s check their iPhone app.
Nope. Not a single drop of rain shown on the radar map for the Weather Channel app, despite the “BREAKING NEWS!” from the Downtown LA area. (Good thing they let me know that I could get “surprisingly accurate horoscopes” through their site. Couldn’t be any worse than the data coming off of their radar maps.)
With the Weather Channel’s data now suspect, let’s look for another source. In a major media market like Los Angeles, every single television station has their own news, weather, traffic, and sports app. Every station will tell you theirs is the best, the most accurate, the fastest with breaking news, and so on. Some stations even have their own Doppler radar setups so they don’t have to rely on the National Weather Service – they would like you to believe this makes them faster, better, and able to give you instantaneous data for your neighborhood, not just the whole region on average. (Honest, the “in your neighborhood” advertising bit is universal here.)
Um…not so much. Channel KNBC’s map shows the alert for the flash flood warning, but shows no rain in the area as of 17:05. Good to know about “Grimm” coming back. Maybe some wereduck from the show could talk to the psychic on the Weather Channel’s site and find the missing radar data.
Channel 7 KABC’s map also shows nothing as of 17:11. This is “surprising” given their investment in the “MEGA Doppler 7000” system, don’t you think? (This is my “surprised” face!)
Channel 2 KCBS’s has three different apps loaded on my phone, but I couldn’t get any of them to run or load. Not a good sign.
But they’re still covering the “BREAKING NEWS!” in their 17:00 news broadcast. A quick check shows that at least their broadcast radar is showing something more closely related to reality.
Being a pilot, I know of other resources that the average person might not be aware of. This is from an app called Hi-Def Radar. The 17:05 radar map here actually shows something that looks like it might be accurate. Good to know if you’re flying!
What if this had been an actual emergency? What if I lived somewhere where those nasty, dark, green blobs weren’t thirty miles away but were instead two miles out and heading straight toward me? The local televisions stations and even the (formerly) legendary Weather Channel might be serving up a lot more marketing hoopla than they are actual cold, hard data.
What about Twitter? It’s not just for following gossip and celebrities, or even space programs, scientists, and authors. I follow a couple of earthquake monitoring bots since they give me almost instantaneous notice of any and all shakers in the area. I also follow the local National Weather Service for days like today.
Oh, my! Look at that! Accurate and timely data, straight from the horses’s mouth (such as it is). I think we have a winner!
Here’s my point – don’t assume that you’re getting accurate and timely data just because it’s coming from an app or website from a big name media-related site!
If you get data though an app, whether it be weather data, driving instructions, turn-by-turn directions, stock and financial data, or anything else, it’s YOUR responsibility to have a good idea about the quality of the data you’re getting. If it’s something where you’re betting your ass on the accuracy of the data, you need to double check your sources in advance so that when you need data instantaneously, you know which sources you can trust and which are less reliable.
I have other examples which I’ll get a chance to document sooner or later, but this is an excellent case study that popped up today. Your mileage may vary, but if you’re in Los Angeles, today’s example shows the weather and radar data on the apps from the Weather Channel and the local television stations are highly questionable. If you want immediate and accurate information about weather hazards (maybe you were one of the hundreds of folks caught in a mudslide last week?) you should be getting your data and radar maps directly from the National Weather Service.
I don’t care if Dallas Rains has a Doppler 7000. His station’s app is useless.
(Yes, there really is a prominent weather guy in LA television named Dallas Rains. Couldn’t make that up.)
Filed under Computers, Los Angeles, Weather
Where Did The Day Go?
I hate the feeling at 23:18 at night when you know that you were busy all day, and you can remember doing that, that, and that, and going there, and taking care of that errand, and picking up those, and spending hours and hours working on this ’cause you promised it for tomorrow — but you feel like, “Did I get anything done today?!”
When in doubt, take a few minutes to flip through some pictures and find one to share. Like this one.
Not taken today, of course. Today we’re setting high temperature records again all throughout the region and there’s not a cloud in the sky. Except for the occasional “pyrocumulus” clouds rising over the brush fires.
I hate the feeling at 23:31 at night when you’ve at least gotten something to post on the website today, but you’ve still got a dozen things to get off your desk before you can go to bed and you have to get up “early for a Saturday” tomorrow to get out to the hangar with that thing you worked on all day…
Filed under Flying, Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 