Food Adventures: Central California Farm Stays
“You’ll want to hit the hay early at Windrose Farm: Roosters replace alarm clocks on Bill and Barbara Spencer’s 70-acre Paso Robles farm and organic apple orchard.: More at the link…
Congrats, Bill and Barbara!
From http://www.weatherpages.com/variety/least.html
11 of the top 14 are in California, along the coast.
US Cities with the least weather variety
More Top 10 weather lists at http://web2.airmail.net/danb1/usrecords.htm
Thursday morning, I drove up 1 to Pacific Valley School to help them get their new WeatherElement station on-line. It took a little troubleshooting, but we got it going. While we’ve tested WeatherElement with satellite Internet before, this is the first live station on line using it. The school uses WildBlue, and the station updates every 5 minutes. They also generate all of their own electricity on-site.
And, last Sunday in the Tribune, John Lindsey wrote about his visit to Creston Elementary School to talk about weather, do some experiments, and explain their new weather station.
Both stations were purchased with grants from PG&E.
In the past few weeks, we’ve added Humbug Vineyards, and Creston Elementary School in the North County, and Springville and The Tower (Bald Peak) in Oregon.
These stations bring the total number of on-line stations to 28, including 22 in SLO County, 2 in Oregon, one in Illinois, one in Texas, one in New Mexico, and one engineering unit under development in Australia.
Look for another new station to come on line soon at the southern end of Big Sur. That will be #29.
From the Trib’s website….
UPDATE 10:55 a.m. Sonic booms from military aircraft flying over the region are believed to be the cause of a rumbling felt and heard across San Luis Obispo County on Thursday morning, according to the Sheriff’s Office.
The United States Geological Survey (USGS) said there were sonic booms at 9:26 a.m. and again at 9:40 a.m., according to a news release from the Sheriff’s Office.
Various state and federal agencies confirmed there was no seismic activity in the area.
Read more here: http://www.sanluisobispo.com/2012/12/20/2334087/sonic-booms-earthquake-shaking.html#storylink=omni_popular#wgt=pop#storylink=cpy
Name that Wind! You can help decide!
The top 5 names are:
the Santa Lucias,
Calientes,
Cuestas,
SLO-downers, and
Santanas.
Cast your vote for your favorite on-line at John Lindsey’s column in the Trib!
Having trouble finding the poll? Try this…
As a programming exercise, I’ve been working on a script that moves the KKJL camera to 8 adjacent images, downloads them, and then stitches them into a 200° panorama. The larger image is then cropped and resized to make the banner on the SLOweather home page. Clicking on the banner should take you to the full 2466 x 220 panoramic image.
That’s a lot of work for the camera, so right now it’s only updated every 10 minutes. Even at that, the camera moves almost 1,300 times a day.
LA has the Santa Anas, Santa Barbara Has the Sundowners… Last week I asked John Lindsey if there was a special name for the SLO version of those, the northeasterly winds that can make things around here so hot and dry, like a week ago.
Not only couldn’t John find a name for them, he wrote about it in his column on Sunday, and made a contest out if it.
All this leads to an interesting question that Chris Arndt of SLOweather.com asked recently: Why doesn’t San Luis Obispo County have its own unique name for these downslope winds?
I don’t know the answer. But perhaps it’s finally time to name these winds. We could call them the Santa Lucia winds, or perhaps the Obispo winds. Maybe even the Cuesta winds.
If you have a suggestion, please write me an email at pgeweather@pge.com. After we get the suggestions together, Chris will post them on SLOweather.com and give everyone a chance to vote for their favorite.
If you don’t have email, please write to John Lindsey, PG&E, P.O. Box 56, Avila Beach, CA 93424-0056.
So, here’s your chance for some local meteorological immortality. Send John your best name for those hot and dry northeasterlies, and I’ll put up a poll of some sort when we get enough responses.
After way too long of a time off-line, the SLOweather cam is back! We have reestablished a wireless Ethernet connection to the site, and have it uploading pictures once a minute. This is a PTZ (pan/tilt/zoom) camera, so you never know where we’ll be pointing it. Check it out…
John Lindsey mentioned several WeatherElement weather stations in his Sunday column in the Tribune.
And the lead photo was of the station on Tassajera Peak. Thanks John!
