SLOweather

The new audio foecast is all screwed up right now, Saturday AM, 29 July 2006. The forecast counds like it’s a rerun of sometime last winter, with highs in 50s and 60s, and lows in the 20s and 30s with a 20% chance of rain.

It’s not just the SLO forcast either, all 4 of the audio forecast feeds are messed up in the same way.

I get that feed from the NWS, so fixing it is out of my hands. I called the Oxnard office responsible for it, and explained the problem. We’ll see how long it takes to get fixed.

At first I thought this helicopter flying over Laguna Lake was fighting a fire. But there was no smoke column, and it was not dipping, but making passes along the far side. It must have been dropping mosquito larvacide as a part of the County’s effort to control mosquitos as a West Nile virus vector.

I had a request to add the local National Weather Service weather radio as a stream to SLOweather. Rather than commit the hardware this would require (radio, computer with sound card, and a server), I found an MP3 feed on the local NWS site.

It should play in just about any player. WinAmp, Windows Media, and QuickTime are a few with which I know it works.

One nice thing about this feed is that, unlike waiting for the loop on the radio, this always starts at the beginning.

If you are interested in forecasts for south of here, there is a page on the NWS web site with a map that links to all of the audio forecasts available from the Oxnard office.

I just received this from the California Independent System Operator. It must be urgent. I can’t even get to their site.

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ISO declared Statewide STAGE 2 Electrical Emergency for 07/24/2006 13:00 through 07/24/2006 21:00

The information in this email distributed by the Governor’s Office of Emergency Services from the California Independent System Operator. Although every effort is made to ensure the accuracy of this email, mistakes can occur. The State of California neither warrants the accuracy of the information, nor the timeliness of delivery. If the information you need is sensitive or urgent, please check the web site or other sources directly.

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There’s lightning everywhere but here today. It’s been a good day to listen to the fire scanner. The Los Padres National Forest has a Lightning Coordinator. That sounds like an interesting job.

There are cover engines from all over the west in our area right now, since our firefighters are off fighting fires. Earlier I heard 2 Arizona engines dispatched, and just now, one from Oregon and one from New Mexico.

The National Weather Service has issued Excessive Heat Warnings and Flash Flood Watches for the San Luis Obispo County Interior Valleys and Mountains for today, Sunday, 23 July, 2006.

The Excessive Heat Warnings are from 10 AM to 7 PM.

The Flash Flood Watches run from “…FROM LATE THIS MORNING THROUGH THIS EVENING…

More details are available on the NWS site or from their RSS feeds.

(These warnings and watches don’t appear in the RSS feed on the SLOweather.com home page because they don’t directly affect San Luis Obispo city environs.)

This site isn’t really weather related, but more astronomical.

Enter your date of birth, and learn all sorts of interesting things about it.

Take your choice. The pros can’t make up their collective minds.

99 weatherforyou.com
93 National Weather Service
91 wunderground.com
83 AccuWeather.com
82 weather.com (The Weather Channel)
82 Almanac.com
82 Intellicast.com

The California/Nevada earthquake web site has been redesigned.

One cool feature they’ve added is email earthquake notification. You can choose notifications for quakes >3.0 or >4.0, and long form for regular email, or a more terse form suitable for pagers and cellphones. There’s also a Shake-Mail product that includes an Intensity ShakeMap for quakes above 3.5 urban and above 4.0 rural.

The site above is for Southern California only, but there is another site listed for worldwide notifications.

Anyway, the San Andreas north of us has been pretty active in the last week. The line of small quakes is very evenly spaced:

I was doing some research on local wildfires and ran across this 4 page PDF account of the 1926 lightning caused petroleum fire at the tank farm on Tank Farm Road.

In 5 days, almost 6 million gallons of oil burned. The initial explosion broke plate glass windows in town.

The fire created its own weather, including fire tornados, some of which are pictured in the article.

Here’s one of them: