little cat feet

San Francisco's fog is a lively, fluid, beautiful thing that keeps our midsummer beautifully moderate.

Summer in San Francisco from Michael Winokur on Vimeo.

Michael Winokur has put together a video showing our fog illuminated by lights, by sun, from above, from below, and (my favorite thing ever), as it pours like cream over the ridges of the Peninsula and Marin Headlands.

I found this via Sutro Tower (no, really - the Bay Bridge also tweets, I love the internet) on Twitter.

snowpocalypse

The east coast of the United States is waking up to a world of snow today, after a record-breaking snowstorm.

A couple of people have posted a link to this image on twitter:



There have been no credits for it, nor precise locations, from what I can find. I'd love more information, both for credit and geographic specificity, if you know of any.

ferocious weather

Well - not really ferocious. We just so rarely get tornados, that when we do, it's a bit startling.



Our tornados in California are almost never as high as 2 on the Fujita scale, and are usually 0 or 1. This one touched down, but well away from where it could do damage.

I keep thinking, "Now I'm going to write about this wacky week of weather," but then we keep having more days of it, and I think, "As soon as it's done ..." Rain is in the forecast, but it looks like the wildness is calming down. Perhaps it's time.

oooh, waves! low pressure systems!

lightning hits the Space Needle

lightning
Originally uploaded by spookythecat.

Geology.com, one of my favorite sites for geographilic information, has a fabulous video from May 23, 2009, of lightning hitting Seattle's Space Needle.

Here's the video:
http://geology.com/news/2009/lightning-hits-space-needle.shtml

And poke around geology.com for more nifty stuff.

Earth from the Space Shuttle

s26_5e007774
Originally uploaded by marymactavish.

Wow! Check out these fabulous cloud photos from STS-125, the final Hubble servicing mission.

I found them on boston.com's The Big Picture.

Some are NASA photos (and thus free to use with attribution) but some are copyrighted to Getty, AP, and at least one private individual.



I love the way the clouds in the streaky, mackerel-sky photo outline the west coast of Baja so beautifully, and the swirls in sea over . . . where is that? Africa?

Click through to The Big Picture to see more photos, including the non-NASA photos, and a great display of some of the tools the astronauts use -- and all the pictures are (of course) BIG.

This mission has driven me to nail biting and tears more than once. I love it. I am captivated. I envy the folks who get to do the EVAs, am sorry for those who aren't. I cheer Megan, who is from my area, and Drew, who is just the epitome of grace under pressure. And today, when John Grunsfeld knocked the cap off of an antenna, I carried my laptop around to do a few things I had to do around the house, because I couldn't leave the live feed, my heart was in my throat in sympathy with poor John. "I feel sick," he said. But they let him fix it, and he did, and everything's fine now.

Go John.

Go Atlantis and your crew, go Hubble.

Go human exploration of space.

fussing about the weather

scorcher
Originally uploaded by glennbphoto.

The San Francisco bay area usually has relatively moderate weather, with the occasional scorcher in July or August. This is the first time I can remember three days in a row like this in April.

The thing is, only houses built since the mid-70s routinely have insulation, and far fewer than that have air-conditioning. Our house has no insulation at all, and despite having a patio on the south side and small windows on the west side, we can spend much of a warm day 5ive to ten degrees hotter indoors than outdoors. We start the day, on days like this, with fans at about 6 am. When the air blowing in goes from neutral to warm, we shut off fans, close windows, close up the master bedroom with the tiny in-room a/c unit, and hang out together in the one room. On a 95 degree day, that bedroom can be kept at about 80, while the hallway will be 86 or so, and the rest of the house at 90-100.

The blessing is that it's not humid. One of my most miserable days was in June 2006, in Boston, when it was 100F outside, 90% humidity. And just as a warning: There's nothing worse than smelling the tar decks of the USS Constitution on a day like that, then going to a kosher deli/restaurant and watching a waiter carry a pile of wiggly gravy-covered meat loaf past your table.

But I digress.

Here, it's about 93F right now, but humidity is in the mid-20s. It's starting to feel cooler outside than inside so I've reopened the house and turned the fans back on. I'm lying around, typing and sweating, with an ice pack between me and the laptop. It's not so bad.

We look moderate on paper partially because though we have days like today, the forecast for Friday is in the high 50s with a chance of rain, and just this time last week, I took this little video 20 miles from here, on a chilly afternoon.

(Photo was taken in San Francisco yesterday. It's possible the sensor was in the sun.)

totally random find while stumbling around in slow motion videos on youtube

Holy cow this is amazing lightning video! The annotations label the various leaders.

I grew up in a part of California that has summer lightning storms, but even those amazing storms weren't like storms can be in other parts of the US and the world. Lightning still enthralls me, rather than scaring me.

I sat through one storm in Arizona, once, under shelter, watching the occasional distant glow of a transformer exploding under a strike. That was enough of the big stuff.

savoring the world, for now

When you're humming down a railway line in Germany, and you see the most intense rainbow you've ever seen before, what else is there to do but to take a picture through the grubby train window?


by @cosmos4u

I arise every morning torn between the desire to save the world and the desire to savor the world. It makes it hard to plan the day.
  -E B White

weather report

It reached 111.8FC/44.3, yesterday, in my old neighborhood in Shasta County, California. Last time I was through there, I went up to Whiskeytown Lake to camp and swim, as it was cooler there than in town, at only 115F. It was 118F in town. I remember 119F at least once when I was little, but not higher. The official highest ever in Redding is lower -- 118F, maybe, or 116 -- but local temps vary, of course, and I remember 119F. We got 119 the same year that our winter snow was so heavy that a Thrifty drug store and the roller skating rink caved in, and my mom made my brother go shovel off the flatter parts of our roof every single day. That would have been 1969 or 1970, I think, as my sisters were hanging out at the local hippie house, at the time, and they tried to cook an egg on the sidewalk there.

So many of my memories aren't attached to specific dates and years, but are attached to when songs were on the radio, or when people around me were doing particular things.

Sense of place: Climate

Originally uploaded by Molly Wassenaar.

I grew up in a Northern California town where we had wet winters, hot dry summers, and mostly dependable weather. It wasn't quite mediterranean, like the San Francisco bay area. Winters were colder, we had snow now and then in the winter, sometimes deep enough to sled in, sometimes lasting a week or more. Summers were hot, with three-digit days unsurprising.

Last time I was there, it was 118F in town, so I took refuge at the lake, where it was only 115, and camped out that night with no tent, lying on top of my sleeping bag, and only a sheet over me all night, to keep mosquitos off.

In seventh grade, I moved to the San Francisco bay area. I remember very clearly waking up on my first school morning there, to walk the mile or so to school, and needing a sweater. It was grim out, and I hated it, and was immediately homesick. But like on most days, it cleared up by 10 or so, and was bright and not too warm after that.

It was springtime in the bay area, and cool, with a thick marine layer. These days, still living in the area (after forays into other parts of the state, and one other country), I often appreciate the fog in the morning, it can easily keep a summer day below 80F. From late July to early September, the sea warms up enough that we lose the layer, and it can get quite hot here.

Last week, I got back from my third visit to New England. The first time we were there, just after summer solstice, it was 100F and 95% humidity. Folks told me it was unseasonably warm. I got sick. It was horrible. I wasn't used to it. Other people there were used to it, and while not happy, managed. This last time, it was less hot, but warm enough, and I went hiking at Middlesex Fells Reservation. It was truly lovely, but the sweat never dried on my back. Stilll, I remember thinking, "Everything is green, and this is nice, but it's stickky. It's not my weather."

I'm so rooted in central California, now, this weather is my weather. I've always lived in in the SF Bay Area or north, within California. Though I've lived in a geographically broad range of places within California, they've still always been in the Mediterranean climate zone, and when I lived overseas, in Australia, I managed to end up on the edge of the tiny portion of Australia that has a Mediterranean climate.

But when I change climates -- on a small scale, from Shasta County to the bay area, or on a larger scale, from the Bay Area to Massachusetts, I am thrown for a loop. The biggest blow to my sense of place is usually how the are around me feels, compared to how I expect it to feel, how the weather behaves, whether I carry an umbrella.

"Rain! The crops are saved!"

It's weird, being a Californian, hearing the rain and being so grateful. It's been a very dry winter, some parts of the state, like Shasta County, have received almost no rain.

In much of the state, we are dry from approximately April to October, with the occasional mild thunder storm or sprinkle, sometimes not a drop. Then, from December to February or March, it rains. Sometimes that rain doesn't start until January, but it rains a lot. Sometimes we get big floods. When we moved into this house a couple of years ago, it took two moves with lots of dedicated help for which we're very grateful, in two massive rainstorms that made it unsafe to use the ramp into the truck, people were slipping on it. We had a big enough truck to do the whole thing in one trip with room left over, but it was raining too hard to safely fill the truck the first time. My partner and I each got very sick, just with so much work in the rain and the cold. Our defenses crashed.

This is a Mediterranean climate zone, one of relatively little of the type in the world. And part of that is pouring wet winters, and bone dry summers. Winter colors here are the dark browns of old vegetation and the bright greens of new grass. Summer is golden with drying grass, fall's a bit brown as the grass dies down utterly.

But this winter has been dry. Dry means we don't get as much rain and snowpack in the Sierra, so our reservoirs don't fill. It means our vegetation is crackly in the summer and our forest fires are scarier. It means our agriculture suffers and food prices rise. Dry and too warm can mean fruit and nut trees flower too early, then any spring rain or heavy wind knocks flowers off, and our orchard crops suffer horribly.

Now it's raining, and I'm relieved. It's been storming for a couple of days, alternating cloudy/damp with what Grandma called "pissing down rain," not windy stormy wet, but a steady rainfall, the kind illustrated with vertical lines and people holding umbrellas. It's the kind that brought about the denouement of the film "Paint Your Wagon." It's just wet.

I know California will change over the next 50 years, it's part of what's making me want to move gradually northward, bringing my buckeye seeds and my redwood seedlings, and settle on California's northwest coast, or in Oregon. I don't want to see the bay area's climate change to that of Los Angeles, which also has wet winters, but is in bona fide desert. I don't want to watch what happens with California's reservoirs and agriculture and riparian systems.

But for now, it's raining. I feel like I have roots and am slurping it up.

(Oh, and the dorky title? That's from a shampoo commercial in the seventies that's been an earworm for me, when it rains, ever since.)