SLOweather

Several times I’ve been asked about all of the forecasts SLOweather lists and why I put them there. They are there because sometimes they individually have a different outlook on the forecast, so comparing and contrasting them may help you to get a feel for what will really happen.

That’s one reason I tell people that really care about the forecast to start reading the NWS Forecast Discussion. This product talks about the various forecast models, how they agree or disagree, and the thinking behind the current NWS forecast. It also is a good lesson in the frustrations of trying to produce an accurate forecast.

Along those lines, here’s a site, Forecast Advisor, which compares the past and recent accuracy of 5 major forecasts. It’s interesting to see how close the top 3 or 4 are together, percentagewise.

I’ll be adding a link to this site as I revamp SLOweather.

Started about 5 pm yesterday, and hasn’t let up much since. Currently we’re at 1.36″ since midnight, 1.83″ since it started. Prefumo Creek is raging. I can here it from up here. And it’s supposed to rain through tomorrow night.

At 6AM it was coming down at 0.40″ per hour.

More at http://www.sloweather.com/storm.htm

I’m going to take some pics when it gets a little lighter (sky, not rain).

A little after 1:30 PM today another microcell passed right over the weather station with heavy rain, and BB sized hail. We had 0.17″ rain in less than 10 minutes (about a 1″ per hour rate), and then the hail in the rain gauge funnel melted and added another 0.03″.

If you tried to check SLOweather during that time, we had a power failure shortly after the rain/hail started. It lasted perhaps an hour or so. Most of the weather and network related equipment here is backed up with UPSes, and I started the generator within a few minutes. I dop’t know about Charter, though.

There must have been a good convective updraft in the cell, as the lightning tracker went nuts for a few minutes:

What’s up with this weather? It looks like May Gray or June Gloom around here, only 2 or 3 months late.

This morning, with the thick fog and stiff breeze, the wind chill was 50 degrees F, and it was raining under the cypress trees out front as they condensed the wind-blown fog.

This just in (7 AM Monday) from John Lindsey at PG&E:

Thunderstorm Warning 08/15/05

An upper-level low about 25 miles southwest of Diablo Canyon
has produced widespread Thunderstorms activity throughout
Central California this morning. Doppler Radar indicated
showers and thunderstorms northeast of Morro Bay moving west
with another band over the Shandon area moving west-southwest.

This condition is expected to produce a chance of scattered showers
and Thunderstorms throughout the Diablo Canyon area through
midnight tonight.

It’s been too cloudy the last couple of mornings to see any of the Perseid meteor showers showers here in SLO. I hope someone in the county got a good look.