Updated Catalina climo data following the end of water year

Here are the updated plots from the Our Garden location on Stallion where a continuous record has been maintained since way back in 1977 when the Sex Pistols, led by Johnny Rotten, were beginning to alter the face of pop music and pop culture and trigger an alternative music and fashion scene called “Punk.”  Let’s see what John Lyden (aka, Johnny Rotten) had to say some years later after the SP years…

Below are the water year data for 2012-2013 ONLY from the Our Garden site, not a mixture of obs from MY gauge and theirs (which could cause “heterogeneities”, as I have posted before.  Not much difference, really, between our sites, but it makes for a cleaner dataset, a “homogeneous” one.  Thanks to the folks at Our Garden, Jesse, Wayne and Jenny, for letting me update their precious data into a spreadsheet lately.  State climo wants it, too.

One difference that stood out this year was that Our Garden was clobbered by a few summer storms that we didn’t get and their water year total is 2 inches more than here (11.08 inches) in Sutherland Heights/Catalina, just a couple miles away.

So, here are the “homogeneous” data back to 1977 FYI:

OG 2012-2013 WYOG period of record WY plot
OG summer rain through 2013

OG cool season precip through 2012-13

I don’t place too much credence in a continuation of a downward trend, lately obdfuscated some by juicy summer rains. These kinds of things, even assuming some slight GW influence, usually reverse themselves rather suddenly with a burst of wetter years such as we see at the beginning of the Our Garden record in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Some of that was fueled to some degree by El Ninos, sometimes called “Eel Nino” due to its monstrous effects on Cal coast and the SW in general. Here’s what “Eel Nino” looks like when it occurs:Eel_Nino

No “Eel Ninos” this winter… Darn.

The End.

By Art Rangno

Retiree from a group specializing in airborne measurements of clouds and aerosols at the University of Washington (Cloud and Aerosol Research Group). The projects in which I participated were in many countries; from the Arctic to Brazil, from the Marshall Islands to South Africa.