There are two apps I’m finding especially useful. The first is Windy, which is available equivalently as a webapp or as a iOS or Android app. It provides many different weather visualizations, including reported temperatures and wind speeds, and radar and weather satellite views. Here is a view of radar imagery from Windy, showing a precipitation cell about 3 minutes away from reaching Davis.
The scientist in me particularly likes how Windy give you several different major forecast models to choose from, at various different spatial extents. For instance it lets you animate the ECMWF global weather model over the next 11 days, good for predicting how long this rainy pattern will last. But Windy also has visualizations of the HRRR (High Resolution Rapid Refresh) model for North America, which is at a 3 kilometer resolution and is updated every hour. Here is a view of predicted precipitation from the HRRR model over a 15 minute period, the image being straight from the HRRR website.
I also just discovered the wX app, available solely for Android. It is basically a repackaging of many different National Weather Service products, allowing you to avoid wading through lots of different NWS website page. From the app’s starting page you can just scroll down to see the NWS text forecasts for your location, and you can also click on an icon to get to a comprehensive suite of different weather radar products e.g. storm relative mean velocity, or reflectivity at various different radar tilt angles.
]]>This is a magnificent view from the GOES 17 geostationary weather satellite of the storm that is about to impact Northern and Central California. This is coming not long after Saturday’s big storm, and yesterday’s forecast discussion from the Bay Area office of the National Weather Service did not mince words:
“To put it simply, this will likely be one of the most impactful systems on a widespread scale that this meteorologist has seen in
a long while. The impacts will include widespread flooding, roads washing out, hillside collapsing, trees down (potentially full groves), widespread power outages, immediate disruption to commerce, and the worst of all, likely loss of human life. This is truly a brutal system that we are looking at and needs to be taken seriously.”
The storm will arrive around daybreak tomorrow and last into Thursday morning. And there are at least two and perhaps more storms following this one.
Time for hunkering.
]]>Point Reyes Station is an odd place. Marin is one of the very richest counties in the United States, and on weekends the town is a gateway for recreational and culinary tourism. Cyclists meander in over the hills from towns on the San Francisco Bay side of the county, stop to browse at the Bovine Bakery. The food here is pricey, emphasizing the local and organic — if I hadn’t found my burrito, I was going to settle for a $8.95 mac-and-cheese. West Marin is quite stably rural though — most of the land is in agricultural easements, mainly for dairy ranching. It made perfect sense for Pica’s symposium on locally-sourced fiber production to be held in this town.
At left is a view from Point Reyes Station, looking west towards the ridge of the Pt. Reyes Peninsula.
]]>We left this idyllic setting to move to Davis in 1999. We’ve been back a couple of times since, but this past weekend was to help a friend celebrate his 25th anniversary of ordination as a Paulist priest. Catholic gatherings are often large, chaotic and sloppy, and I enjoyed spending a quiet couple of hours on the beach with Frs. Ed and Ruben, and Jeff and his family, ahead of the big celebration before meeting Numenius on the train from Burbank.
I did sneak in a quick trip to Solvang, home of Village Spinning and Weaving, in the morning. I wasn’t spinning yet when we lived in Santa Barbara and it was a delight to drive up past the Trout Club, yuccas all abloom, and over the pass into the Santa Ynez Valley. (I used to climb that hill on my bike! I could hardly believe it.) The following morning, after a walk around Lake Los Carneros and submitting our entries to the final International Flower Report, Numenius and I took Cathedral Oaks Road into town, seeing old haunts and reciting street names as they unfolded through the windshield.
Memory is a strange phenomenon, treacherous and fickle, much poked at by the likes of a different Marcel. It’s triggered by externals we can’t control, befuddled by others (driving through the UCSB campus was an exercise in complete disorientation). How we crave stability, control. How futile that is. How very futile. Best to enjoy the ride, like the bright young things on the beach in Isla Vista, surfing through the weekend…
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