Light! Dark! Silhouettes! Chiaroscuro! Palm Trees! Sun! Blue Sky! Black Clouds!
Telephone Poles & Wires!!
Interpretation is left as an exercise for the MFAs out there among you.
Category Archives: Weather
Yet More Weird, Weird Weather
The LEAPTech NASA Social pictures and articles are coming. 295 pictures (plus more than an hour of video) are being whittled down to about three dozen images, to be combined with the story behind them all, probably in a four-part report. That’s not quite done yet.
This week’s Flash Fiction from Chuck Wendig, which I’ve missed for about a month now? Yeah, right. Maybe that’s not happening again this week either.
At risk of simply “talking about the weather” — Jeeze Louise, did you see the rain coming down today in SoCal?!
If you haven’t spent a few years in the region, you can’t really grasp just how unusual it is to get rain here at this time of year. It’s not quite “sign of the impending Apocalypse” unusual, but it’s definitely “holy crap what’s going on here” unusual. Especially while we’re in this four-year drought and getting about 1% of the rain we normally get in the “rainy season.”
Today I was out at the CAF hangar, playing catch up. The rain out in Camarillo was significant, and being that I was in a huge, mostly empty, metal echo chamber, the noise was impressive as well. I was involved with my accounting stuff and really hadn’t noticed that everyone else had left, so when the next wave of really heavy showers hit, I was surprised to find myself alone.
It’s a little hard to hear, but at about the 12-second point the noise went from really loud to really, REALLY loud. (And doesn’t that Spitfire look gorgeous? I love that plane, I really do.) After the dash through the ops office to get a view outside, you can also see a small plane on short final off in the distance. It looked like a Cessna 150 or 172, and in that weather he had to really have his hands full. I saw him taxi by a little later so he got down OK, but the pilot might need a change of pants.
An hour or so later, after it had tailed off a bit, I made my dash to the car. The Camarillo area was in a relatively calm spot, but there were awesome and ominous clouds all around. To the north, toward the coastal mountains…
…and toward the south and the ocean about five miles away.
Finally, I made it home (through scattered showers) just to have it start to absolutely pour again just as I was turning into the driveway. (Timing is everything!) In addition, soon after we got an hour or so of lightning and thunder, always a favorite of mine. (Really — not being snarky.)
For those of you where this kind of weather is known as “Thursday,” I hope you’ll forgive the “gee whiz” factor here. I grew up with “normal” weather and loved it when it got a little bit active. After more than forty years in SoCal, with its extremely muted climate, this is great stuff.
Filed under CAF, Panorama, Photography, Video, Weather
Tiny Drops
It almost NEVER rains in SoCal after March or early April. Yet tonight while letting the dog-beast enjoy her evening constitutional, there were little tiny drops.
Reflected in the back window of the Volvo…
…and off of the roof. (The car’s red, the sky wasn’t.)
Make no mistake, the drought’s bad, getting worse fast, and has excellent potential to be a real world-class disaster. But over and above that, our weather is just getting…statistically unlikely, on a regular basis. Or just odd.
Later this evening we got actual, honest to god rain. Not much, probably only 0.10″ or so, but radar shows some widely scattered showers that are pretty heavy. And it’s a cold system, so our high is only going to be about 58°F tomorrow with the snow level in the mountains down below 5,000 feet.
In May??! In Southern California??!!
Little tiny drops might be great big signs and portents of changes that are already in motion.
Filed under Los Angeles, Photography, Weather
April Was One Great Month!
A month ago I was happy to have survived March. March this year had some really good times (“Fifi” visiting us at CAF SoCal, my chance to fly in her, my birthday, CAF SoCal website launch, CAF audit, tax returns, daughter coming home from South America) but was generally lived at about 100 miles an hour with no rest stops.
It occurred to me today when I noticed that post that April had been just as busy, if not more so. But where March felt like hard work, April felt like the whole month was spent at Disneyland. (The good Disneyland, i.e. the fantasy one in the commercials, not the real Disneyland, with long waits for every ride and crowds like the Tokyo subways at rush hour.)
April started with a total lunar eclipse, the third one in less than two years!
There were two week-long trips to the East Coast, with all of the fun & games of commercial air travel. That included our first set of lost luggage in quite a while, some delays due to weather and mechanical issues that led to some very tight connections, and enough jet lag to keep my head spinning like a top.
North Carolina had weather & thunder boomers! Duke Gardens! The Durham Museum of Live & Science! Artsy-trendy-weird hotel-restaurant-bar-museum place! Durham Bulls Stadium! North Carolina Museum of Natural Science! North Carolina State Capitol Building!
I got an invite and went to my fourth NASA Social, this one in Washington for Hubble’s 25th Anniversary! The Smithsonian Air & Space Museum! The Capitol, White House, Washington, Lincoln, & Jefferson Memorials! The World War II and Vietnam War Memorials! A game at Nationals Park! Meeting up with my sister-in-law and getting to see my niece perform in an epic belly dance performance!
Whew!
After a good & busy March, I celebrated with fireworks pictures from Dodger Stadium. That resulted in a great & busy April. How ’bout we post more pictures from that set and see if we can go for a fantastic & busy May? (Let’s keep it going, I’ve got a whole thesaurus of superlatives to use.)
Sympathetic magic from a die-hard physics major? Whatever works, baby, whatever works.
Evening Light Show
Doing visiting and tourist things in North Carolina (don’t worry, you’ll be seeing enough pictures to choke a horse) and I mentioned yesterday that we had an ominous dawn with clouds and a forecast of severe weather.
As predicted, after sunset, the thunderstorms built up and moved into the area. We had several hours of a very nice light show, mainly to our east and south, but with a couple of cells being close enough to rattle the windows.
Trying to catch any of the lightning with the camera turned out to be challenging. I was just shooting through the hotel window, so there was some reflection off the glass, as well as some artifacts from the street lights shining through rain on the window. Here you can see some activity at the far right.
Most of the lighting seemed to be cloud-to-cloud, so much of what I was seeing was more like brightening of the clouds instead of discrete lighting bolts. But there were a few bolts that could be seen between the clouds.
While there were a few cloud-to-ground bolts to be seen off in the distance, the nearer cells had some amazing cloud-to-cloud activity. It was very cool watching multiple bolts crawl across the sky from storm cell to storm cell.
Living in Southern California I don’t have a lot of opportunities to practice taking pictures of lightning. As a result, I approached the challenge of capturing some of the storm on camera much like I try imaging fireworks – ten second exposures, shooting one after another after another, hoping for the best. It’s a brute force approach, but by casting a wide enough yet and sticking with it, a few of the many, many images caught a little bit of what I was watching.
It’s not ready for “National Geographic” yet, but it’s a start. It’s a pity the weather’s supposed to be good for the rest of our stay here!
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Ominous Dawn
Still traveling, still just a bit scrambled. The good news is that our luggage got here. Yeah!
I’ve long been bored by Los Angeles’ standard “late night, early morning low clouds, high in the mid 70’s, low tonight in the 60’s.” Sometimes it seems that they can repeat that verbatim about 360 days of the year and no one would know the difference. So I prefer to see a bit of “real” weather. Rain is OK, thunderstorms are great!
The morning dawned in a wonderfully ominous mood:
It managed to clear up (drat!) for most of the day while we were driving around and sightseeing, and by evening it was actually looking calm. I was disappointed.
While we were eating dinner some big, black clouds started to roll in from the west, and most of the evening it’s been raining, along with occasional lighting and thunder. Most of the big boomers have been off a couple of miles, but we had one nice cell go right over us and rattle the windows real well a couple of times.
I approve!
Filed under Photography, Travel, Weather
Weather 1, ‘Fifi’ 0
The plan was for the CAF’s ‘Fifi’, the world’s only flying B-29, to fly from Phoenix (where it spent the weekend) to Camarillo today.
Aren’t plans wonderful? Do you hear the gods laughing?
Since airlines were grounding their modern, new, advance tech commercial jets in Phoenix this morning, it didn’t seem wise to try to take off in an irreplaceable 70-year-old WWII bomber. Aside from all of those CAF rules and all of that, there’s common sense to consider.
Even if Phoenix had been clear, they would have had to somehow get through all of these dark green and yellow and pink splotches to get to the big blue dot on the far left. Again, flying anything into a thunderstorm is contraindicated, and it’s contraindicated^10 for B-29s. (I think it’s phrased exactly that way in the original B-29 user’s manual.)
Meanwhile, about the time that we were expecting ‘Fifi’ in Camarillo, the clouds were broken directly overhead, but getting darker.
Two hours later it was still ugly over the mountains and getting worse, with that blotch at the bottom heading for us with hail, strong winds, and heavy rain. (Google for pictures of the pier in Huntington Beach covered in hail today, covered to the point where it looks like they got a couple inches of snow.) There were also some heavy rains back over our house.
Looking off toward all of those big, dark green blotches, it was again not a good sky to be flying through.
Discretion being the better part of valor, ‘Fifi’ and her crew stayed in Phoenix and will come out to Camarillo tomorrow. The forecast for the whole area looks beautiful. It will be great to see ‘Fifi’ flying in again with some of our fighters providing the escort.
Spring’s Forward Scout
A barren tree, a wintery blue sky and a few whispy clouds. Could be winter in Minnesota, Maine, or Mississippi.
With a few days of rain and wind in the last couple of weeks, the last of the leaves are gone from most of the leafy trees.
But the winters are mild and short in Southern California. There’s no snow on the ground, and it’s closer to 70°F than to 20°F.
The branches won’t be bare for long.
99.9% of the branches are tipped with buds, ready to burst, like popcorn kernels that are so close to going off.
Someone’s got to be first, and this particular branch tip decided to jump the gun. Go big or go home!
A harbinger of better times to come? Or an unembarrassed and unabashed overachiever? Maybe we’re just seeing spring’s advance scout, checking to make sure the bees are ready to come out and play.
{{Note — It’s Flash Fiction Thursday, but I’m still writing my piece and there’s no way it’s done by midnight, so I’ll post it tomorrow.}}
Filed under Flowers, Photography, Weather
Panoramas: Spring Is Coming
Lest all of my friends in Boston and Massachusetts (Hi, Peter! Hi, Debbie!) despair of ever finding the bottom of the snow drifts that have them marooned in their own homes, so that they don’t all think that Eddard Stark was the one true prophet, here’s a picture from today at Camarillo Airport following yesterday’s “relentless drizzle”:
SPRING IS COMING!
By the way, have I mentioned how much I like the “pano” feature on the new iPhones? It’s fast, easy, intuitive, and you save all the time of having to stitch together individual photo frames. You can then immediately email it, post it, or upload it.
The only negative I’ve found so far is that you can’t do a full 360° panorama. Plus, stitching together a ton of high-resolution individual photo frames will give you a MUCH more detailed panorama.
However, the trade-off for speed and ease is worth it. Plus, of course, I also had my “good” camera with me and took the frames I need for that full-sized panorama.
iPhone panorama (top) is 6816 x 1479 (10.1 megapixels). This version is slightly “smoother”, for example, if you look at the far edge of the taxiway in front of me.
Panorama from nine frames of 3888 x 2592 (10.0 megapixels) each combine to an image of 13,386 x 2,290 (30.6 megapixels). This version has much better dynamic range (items in shadow show up much better) and viewed full-sized (click on either image) it’s a much more detailed picture.
Both are great for what they do and what their strong points are. Neither is perfect.
But the bottom picture does have that fantastic Socata TBM 700 taxiing by at the far left. (And the resolution to be able to read the N-number!) NICE plane!
Chin up, Southern New England!
Filed under CAF, Panorama, Photography, Weather
Wind
The Santa Ana winds are blowing.
Anyone who has lived in Southern California know what that means. High pressure over Nevada, strong offshore winds, adiabatic heating, and the wind funneling through canyons and mountain passes speeds up as it’s squeezed through.
It was starting to kick up when I left for the CAF hanger this morning.
Out in Camarillo, near the ocean, near the edge of a large plain to the south of many of those aforementioned canyons and mountain passes, it was blowing a steady 20 to 30 knots, occasionally getting up to 35 knots steady, with gusts on and off to 50+ knots. Many of us there (most of us pilots) thought that might be a low value for some of the more severe gusts.
Planes have a tendency to blow about in such winds, but we made it through the day with just a couple of worrisome moments, no actual emergencies or damage. But it kept everyone hopping. The rides we had scheduled for the day got re-scheduled, obviously. Gusts of 20 to 25 knots are “exciting” in a small plane. Gusts of 40 to 50 knots can be downright dangerous. Let the business jets and commercial airliners have the skies today.
It also turns the huge hangers (like where I spend most of my days) into drums as the thin metal siding rattles and vibrates. Even more attention-getting, when you get a gust that REALLY howls past, some of the little holes in the structure (around doors, where wiring and pipes enter the building, etc) can act like wind instruments, giving off some truly ungodly howls.
Jessie loves it when it blows like this.
We suspect that it’s because there are so many new and interesting smells coming from far away. To us it just means allergies and sandpaper dry skin — to her it’s a cornucopia of sensations that we can’t even imagine. Her nose twitches a mile a minute, her head swivels to listen to the wind in the trees and catch the next exotic scent. For a few minutes, she’s a puppy again and the whole world is hers to explore.
The Santa Ana winds are blowing.
Filed under CAF, Dogs, Los Angeles, Weather
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 