Thursday, February 1st, 2007 is the Full Snow Moon in our time zone. Moon rise is at 5:10 PM Thursday evening. It becomes full at 9:45 PM our time, which means that it is full in the Eastern time zone at 12:45 AM on Friday the second. It sets here at 6:57 AM on Friday.
Other Native American names for the February full moon are the Full Hunger Moon and Full Storm Moon.
As of 7:15 AM Saturday morning 27 Jan 2007, SLOweather has recorded a little over three-quarters of an inch of rain. The forecast models have been all over the place the last few days, so, while a chance of rain was expected, the quantity so far is a pleasant surprise.
It looks as if there is a shakeup in the weather pattern, leading to a more unsettled and moister pattern, at least through the first part of the week.
The other day, this American kestrel was hanging out on one of our coast live oak saplings in the back yard, no doubt waiting for something tasty to make an appearance.
The Bishop Manzanita has seemingly been unaffected by our recent dry and cold weather and is happily blooming away.
This hummingbird was out early getting breakfast, and had a little sip of nectar while I was photographing the manzanita flowers. My camera’s response was a little slow to get a really good picture of him or her.
The low so far this morning at the SLOweather station was 28 degrees F at 5:43 AM. The lowest temperature I’ve seen so far this morning is 10 degrees F at Santa Margarita Lake.
There was ice on our bird bath this morning.
There were a few birds from our feeder looking for a drink, so I broke a few holes in it. I was expecting just a glaze of ice on it, but it was thicker and stronger than that, a quarter to a half an inch.
Since I’ve been checking the weather, I’ve noticed how much the temperature can vary over a fairly small area. It can change as much as a degree or two per mile over fairly flat land, and several degrees over a small change in elevation.
Just this morning, there is 4 degrees F difference between the main SLOweather station here at home (30) , and another thermometer down in our woods (26), about 350′ away and 100′ lower in elevation.
Because of that, since I’ve been using WxSim to make my own local forecasts, I’ve noticed how difficult it can be to make accurate local temperature forecasts. What is accurate for my location may not be right for the airport, or for downtown.
I had a stray bit of code on the SLOweather home page that was keeping the downtown cam from appearing when viewed in Internet Explorer. That problem has been fixed.
It’s not very often that we see this sort of forecast around here: (Note that this is a image of a portion of a screen grab that was current at the time I wrote this post, so the “Click here for details…” doesn’t work. I could have made the link live, but after today, it wouldn’t have made a lot of sense.)
I’ve been working on the SLOweather home page lately, and I just learned that the downtown camera is missing in Internet Explorer. I’ll fix that as soon as I can. In the interim, it shows up fine in Firefox, so if you really want to see the cam view sooner, try that.
The NWS is predicting overnight low temperatures for our area down into the low to mid 20s F for Thursday and Friday (11 and 12 January, 2007). This cold snap is widespread enough and cold enough that the Office of Emergency Services has issued their own preparedness statement. You can read the entire PDF here.
Tonight I added some new parameters to SLOweather. You’ll see current wind gusts, and record and average high and low temps for the day.