Category Archives: Cartoons

Cartoons, Catalina climate data, Definitions, El Nino-La Nina

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.

Cartoons, Cumulonimbus clouds, Cumulus clouds, Definitions, Frank Ludlum, Science stories

Not expected, but it missed anyway

Woke up to Cumulonimbus clouds NW-N of Catalina.  Hmmm.  Here’s the unexpected, pretty sight just after sunrise:

7:24 AM. “Pretty, but will likely die much after sunrise.” Cumulus and Cumulonimbus clouds along a windshift line moving toward Catalina continued to develop throughout the morning while getting closer.
9:34 AM. Odd line of Cumulus congestus growing into Cumulonimbus clouds with major rainshafts is getting closer still. “What’s keeping this going so early in the day?”

 

10:00 AM. “Upon closer inspection….”, a windshift line is detected via photography!
Arrow point to shred cloud below base of the turret at left. This is a great example of how clashing winds build clouds. Above the shred clouds is that vigorously growing turret trying to reach the glaciation level.
10:06 AM. It made it! (to the glaciation level)  Maybe it means that the line of fat Cumulus-Cumulonimbus might make it here to Catalina and rain on me! I’m getting excited. Arrow points to icy top, though as cloud maven juniors you would already recognize that icy top, so I left the arrow out since I forgot add it anyway.  These are the best kinds of icy tops to study with an airplane because they near the threshold temperature where ice forms in clouds on this day.  That threshold level changes from day to day, strangely believe it, and the warmer the BOTTOM of the cloud, the HIGHER the temperature at which ice forms, strangely believe it#2.  Even stranger, Mr. Cloud-maven person thought he had discovered this interesting fact back in 1988 and then he found that this guy, the Englishman, Frank Ludlum, one of the best we’ve ever had in cloud studies, and I should have known better, had reported the SAME THING 36 years earlier in 1952!  There is nothing new under the sun, Ecclesiastes said, and I guess I found out first hand.  Darn.  I laughed bitterly when I saw that Science mag cartoon about stuff like this, posted below because it won’t fit in this caption.  Darn.  You can see I still have some feelings about having something to report but then finding out that it had already been reported. I thought maybe I was gong to be famous, perhaps win a prize of some kind, but no.  (See second cartoon)


Well, the end of the story (told in the captions) is that a windshift producing this line of heavy Cu and a Cb or two and it “struck” Catalina about 11 AM;  the wind turned from the SW to the N, but the heavy line of clouds riding it were nowhere to be seen at that time; the last Cumulonimbus cloud disappearing beyond the Charoleau Gap. Tough to take after hopes up.

Only in the early afternoon did a gift of a few drops from a towering Cumulus directly overhead produce the final surprise. The drops fell from 1:22 PM to 1:23 PM. I rushed outside to see what the heck was doing it and here that cloud is (last two photos) from the bottom up.

1:23 PM. Its raining!

 1:23 PM also. Arrow points to ice, showing that this little guy got to the ice-forming level, and would have been another great subject for an aircraft study of ice formation.

Mods see afternoon isolated Cumulonimbus today.

The End.