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Archive for April, 2008

Solar halo this morning

Tuesday, April 8th, 2008

About 7:15 AM Tuesday, while walking the dogs, I observed this faint 22 degree halo around the sun.

You can just make out a sundog in the halo on each side of the sun, and possibly the hint of an upper tangent arc above it.

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Shell Creek Road Wildflowers

Saturday, April 5th, 2008

Today, Katie and I headed northeast to Shell Creek Road to check out the wildflower display. Street Atlas said it was about 90 miles.

All of these pictures have been reduced in size to fit the blog format. Some have been cropped to bring out detail. After I finish this post, I’ll see about putting them up full size in the SLOweather gallery.

There were lots of fields of filaree or storksbill. This isn’t a native wildflower, and the seeds form corkscrews that drill into our dogs coats.

Lots of mules ears…

A lone roadside lupine…

Fields and fields of baby blue eyes…

Side road…

Tidy tips…

On Shell Creek Road, it’s clear how goldfields got their name.

Along the road…

Hillsides of bush lupine…

If you go, don’t be so distracted by the vistas that you miss the roadside flowers.

Indian paintbrush…

and Owls clover…

Now on 41, a hillside of tansy leafed phacelia, California poppies, and fiddleneck…

We stopped for lunch at The Loading Chute in Creston,

On 229, on the way back to 58, some showy phlox…

And, shot at speed out the truck window on 101 southbound on the NW side of the grade, a hillside of ceanothus.

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Comments on the lightning post from earlier today

Tuesday, April 1st, 2008

In a comment on my lightning post, The Cyclist said:

“Ha, so that’s what that was! I was wondering what I was looking at when I checked the local loop this morning. Pretty neat!”

A lot of times I build SLOweather pages for myself, because I come up with an idea, or because I find a new PHP programming trick I want to try. And then I forget to explain what’s going on to my SLOweather users.

So, here’s the lightning story.

Among the other weather instruments here, we run a Boltek Stormtracker lightning detector. This is a PC card installed in the weather computer, connected to a special outdoor antenna. Between the StormTracker and NexStorm software, lightning strikes within range are measured for direction and signal strength. A single antenna lightning detector like this can be fairly accurate at direction, but distance can only estimated on signal strength, and lighting strikes vary in intensity.

To compensate, the software averages the readings from several strikes in the same storm to get a better estimation of the storm’s location (and there are also calibration features in the program to aid in storm ranging). You can see the NexStorm output here.

Enter StrikeStarUS.com. One way to accurately locate lightning strikes is by triangulation. Triangulation uses direction data on one strike from 2 or more detectors to locate the strike. Members of StrikeStarUS have the same hardware/software setup as SLOweather, and send their data to the StrikeStarUS server. There, the data is triangulated and plotted.

In return for the use of our data, StrikeStarUS returns regional strike data to members as a part of an map application called WASP2 (Wide Area Storm Probe 2), and allows us to post that on our web sites. One value-added feature of WASP2 is the NEXRAD overlay. It’s the WASP2 image with NEXRAD that’s shown under the Radars/SLOwx Radar menu selection.

And then, not too long ago, I decided to write a little PHP script that would collect the last 90 minutes of WASP2 images and make an animated GIF out of them. That’s the SLOwx Radar Loop selection. As The Cyclist said, “Pretty neat!”

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