SLOweather

I just received the following in email from John Lindsey out at Diablo Canyon:

The PG&E Met Office in San Francisco has upgraded a Thunderstorm Watch to a Thunderstorm Warning for the Central Coast and inland areas today.

Thunderstorms developed this morning in the Bay Area, the Delta, and the Lower Sacramento Valley. A Tornado Warning was issued for Eastern Solano County, Yolo County, and Southwestern Sacramento County as radar indicated the development of a severe thunderstorm capable of producing a tornado 8 miles northwest of Rio Vista this morning.

Doppler radar at Vandenberg AFB shows a line of showers moving down the California coastline towards San Luis Obispo this morning. Showers and thunderstorms will continue to develop today due to unstable air aloft and surface heating. These thunderstorms will be accompanied by brief heavy rain, small hail, gusty surface winds, and lightning.

My wife spotted these clouds Sunday, off to the southeast from our back deck.

There are some things, though, that I just haven’t figured out how to photograph. Right now, for instance, the sheets of rain traveling across the canyon, or earlier this morning, the cloud deck racing across the sky from souteast to northwest.

We went to Fiala’s in Old Edna this morning for breakfast, and watched the Tour Of California go by. It was an amazing sight, especially all of the mobile infrastructure and support vehicles.

Here’s an excerpt from this morning’s (Friday, 24 Feb 2006) National Weather Service Hazardous Weather Outlook:

“A LARGE AND STRONG STORM SYSTEM IS EXPECTED TO AFFECT THE AREA MONDAY INTO TUESDAY. RAIN MAY BEGIN LATE SUNDAY…BUT THE HEAVIEST AND MOST INTENSE RAIN IS EXPECTED MONDAY INTO TUESDAY. RAINFALL INTENSITIES MAY BE HIGH ENOUGH TO CAUSE FLOODING…PARTICULARLY IN AND AROUND THE RECENTLY BURNED AREAS…AND MUD AND DEBRIS FLOWS WILL BE A THREAT. IN ADDITION…STRONG SOUTH WINDS OF 25 TO 35 MPH WITH STRONGER GUSTS ARE EXPECTED MONDAY INTO EARLY TUESDAY…WITH THE
STRONGEST WINDS IN HIGHER TERRAIN AND ON THE CENTRAL COAST.

I’ve received 3 comments on my Snow post from last weekend. 2 of them got the movie correct which I had in mind.

White Christmas… But… I need a teacher’s input here…

Peggy pointed out, “White Christmas or Holiday Hotel? Asked my husband, so no google!!!

Points for White Christmas, bonus points for not using Google (unless her husband’s name is Google )

I had forgotten about the other movie. White Christmas was supposedly a remake of… Holiday _Inn_, although I never saw more than a superficial resemblance.

So, I’d really like to assign double bonus points, but the title of the second movie is only half right.

What do I do?

This morning I took down the computer that serves the SLOweather and BikeSLO blogs, and the SLOweather home page RSS feeds, and upgraded the operating system. It’s back on line now, and seems to be fine.

I didn’t notice it until this afternoon, but east Cuesta Ridge received a sprinkling of snow last night. This picture is cropped from a digital picture I took from our deck here at SLOweather.

That part of the ridge is about 8 miles from here.

Points for naming the movie from which I stole the lyric for the title of this post.

(Bonus points for not using Google. )

The SLOweather storm page used to have a link on it for rain in the last 24 hours. I changed that with a bit of javascript to calculate yesterday’s rain instead.

Zillow is an interesting site. It seems to combine appraised property value information with a graphical aerial photo interface. Check out your neighbohood.