Crows Overhead, Skies Are Gray

Today was the second annual UC Davis winter bird count; we did a sector of campus centered around the Wildlife Health Center where Pica works. The best birds were a bufflehead and a sharp-shinned hawk: Pica has a full list on Bird By Bird. It was overcast all morning with occasional sprinkles.

It’s been a good week for weather-watching, with a nice series of storms hitting California. We’ve logged 4.35 inches of rain here since Monday. I’m glad I bought a new pair of rain pants last weekend. I’ve been reading up on my meteorology, and found a great educational website yesterday for learning all about operational forecasting. This is the MetEd site (Meteorology Education and Training) site which is run by the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research. I spent several hours today working through their educational module on Skew-T diagrams, which are the graphs made to illustrate the data collected from weather balloon soundings.