SLOweather

I found this ceanothus a little ways up Prefumo Canyon today, next to the road.

This isn’t quite weather related, but it’s just too cool to ignore. On 3 Feb 2006, astronauts on the International Space Station will hand-launch a worn-out Orlan Russian spacesuit containing a radio transmitter system and synthesized voice message and telemetry system.

If you have a radio capable of tuning 145.99 mhz, you can try to hear it.

More details on Space.com here.

A few days ago, four of the Seven Sisters visible from the SLOweather environs wore hats of clouds. The on-shore breeze pushed the humid, warmer ground-level air up the western flanks to climes where the air is cooler and a little thinner, which caused clouds to form around the peaks. To glance at them, the clouds looked static, but watching them for a while, they could be seen to form on the windward side of the mountains, and dissipate on the lee side. I’m not quite sure why Cerro San Luis had the biggest hat. She’s not the tallest sister, but is the one furthest inland wearing a hat on that day.

(Note: I know, technically there are Nine Sisters, but I like the alliteration of Seven Sisters…)

Did you feel the quake at 8:37 Sunday morning? I’ve heard one report from someone that felt a sharp jolt over on the easter side of town.

If you did feel it, you can file a report with the USGS here. That particular event ID is nc40182770.

Saturday night was the January full moon, the Wolf Moon.

From the Farmer’s Almanac (different from The Old Farmer’s Almanac):

‘Amid the cold and deep snows of midwinter, the wolf packs howled hungrily outside Indian villages. Thus, the name for January’s full Moon. Sometimes it was also referred to as the Old Moon, or the Moon After Yule. Some called it the Full Snow Moon, but most tribes applied that name to the next Moon.”

A little before 11AM today, a microcell passed over the SLOweather weather station. It’s the orange dot in the radar image below.
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We had pea-sized hail and heavy rain, receiving 0.14″ in about 5 minutes.

Meanwhile, only a couple of miles away, downtown SLO was sunny, and the SLOweather webcam captured this partial double rainbow.

The current NWS Special Weather Statement regarding this weekend’s forecasted storm is available throught a link on the SLOweather home page.

It looks like this will be a colder event that the New Year’s storms, with less rain. Among other things, it says, “SNOW COULD EVEN MIX WITH THE RAIN OVER THE HIGHER TERRAIN OF
SAN LUIS OBISPO COUNTY SATURDAY NIGHT.

It looks like Caliente Peak might get a little decorative dusting by Sunday.

I was looking over the daily SLOweather weather history graphs available on The Weather Underground, specifically the rainfall rates for the New Year’s storm.

Here’s the rainfall rate graph for New Year’s Day:

It’s pretty interesting to see the sawtooth nature of the trend, how the rain comes in waves of increasing and then decreasing intensity.

There’s a similar, smaller trend we could see looking through the rain across Prefumo Canyon, as the rain came down in “sheets”. I tried to get a picture of it, but didn’t have much luck.

Update. It looks like Wunderground is back on -line.
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The Weather Underground site which archives SLOweather’s weather data seems to be down today, Saturday. We link to them for weekly and monthly graphs, and tabular data.

I have no information on when they will be back on-line

Conditions at dawn the last couple of days have been good for contrail formation in the east. Today’s almost looked like some form of ancient writing.