National Snow Cover

Just an FYI. Here's today's Intellicast national snow cover map. And here's the link to find it yourself should the urge ever arise.

Arctic Circle has all the fun!

Those lucky (but frozen) puppies up in the Arctic Circle latitudes have all the fun! Being as it's a Saturday morning, I decided to roam over to Spaceweather.Com and see whazzup. They have some nice aurora photos there such as the one above. The guy who took the one above is Aleksander Chernucho,Mt. Khibiny, Kolyskia peninsula, Russia. The photo was taken yesterday when it was 27FEB here and 28 FEB there. Aleksander has a really cool photo album on a Russian website. It's all in Russian language but the photos speak a universal language and you don't need to know Russian to enjoy them. Note the little slider bar at the top of his album. Play with it and you automatically resize the pictures. COOL!

Well, the Aurora doesn't really have anything whatsoever to do with our North American weather. However, I thought it would be nice to have a "change of pace," so to speak, and put something purely fun and entertaining up on El Blog today.

As winter is fast nearing an end, I think tomorrow's Sunday School will be a most excellent time to begin a review in preparation for your semester final exam. So come prepared to think and learn. Okie, dokie? Have a fun day. You may go play now.

NORCAL drought is history

(See note at end of post.) The February 19 drought monitor already showed NORCAL "going green" again. That's a HUGE improvement from previous drought forecasts. Well, that was more than a week ago. Now, lookie here, the "hazards assessment" shows NORCAL is right back in the crosshairs for incoming Pacific water bombs. Hum...I am going out on a big limb once again and making a statement: The NORCAL Drought is over. It's history. Bambi and Smokey and all the little forest creatures can rest easy this summer--their home isn't going to burn to the ground. Nope, the heat's off up in NORCAL. Whew, that's huge!

Meanwhile, of course, SOCAL can't buy a break. So, that's where we would expect all the dry season fires to be centered once again. But at least the top half of The Golden State is Okie Dokie for 2009. Congratulations, NORCAL!

Note added 28FEB: Arnie What's-His-Name, the California Guv, came out yesterday and declared a statewide drought disaster or emergency or something like that. The article I read says things are 57% of normal. Well, I guess no one's checked the SNOTEL's today as they are all significantly above 57%. The Klamath in NORCAL is running 90% of normal. That's ain't great but that ain't no drought either! When you add in the progged precip upcoming in the next five days, there's no doubt it will be at or above 100% up there. Yes, SOCAL is hurting but NORCAL is out of the woods. Iguess it's politically more expedient to scare the begeebers out of EVERYBODY rather than telling it like it is.

Redoubt Dissected!

Well, folks, this is what a volcanic cone looks like when it gets WAAAY too much attention! People with a heck of a lot of time on their hands find things like "ice pistons" and "slurry tracks." Heck, I thought Ice Pistons was a dormant basketball team! And are Slurry Tracks what happens when you drink to much wine and try to use your iPod? Well, we're having fun with Redoubt, no doubt. Hey, meanwhile, the AVO Crowd has bumped Cleveland to Code Yellow. That's NOT Mellow Yellow--Yellow means something is happening that we need to pay attention to. I clicked through every link I could find but, so far, I haven't found out why Cleveland is now Code Yellow. Cleveland could be a nice little chimney, puffing out periodic doses of Sulfuric Acid into the Arctic Skies. Maybe Ol' Man Winter just doesn't want to end his gig this year! Click here to visit AVO.

Alaskan Action

I was roaming around looking for a good rendition of the new addition to the sidebar--NWS Offices nationwide. I happened to stumble into the latest Alaskan warning map. Gee, it's a colorful little bugger! So, I clicked off to see whazzup in The Last Frontier, as they like to call themselves. Lots of blizzard warnings, gales, and storms of various varieties. It's kind of interesting, actually. Click here to go to the summary page and then just scroll down and skim all the fun nomenclature. NOTE: We just put a text narrative at the very bottom of this blog explaining how to capture and process a screen shot like the one above. You might enjoy reading it.

Site Stats

A couple of weeks ago I decided to put a "site monitor" on this blog. I wanted to know if people were really reading the blog. Once in awhile, I get a comment but not very often, as you know. So, I wanted to know if I was writing into a vacuum. The last two weeks of statistics tell me that this blog has a fairly regular readership. It looks like a couple of dozen readers visit the blog each day. That's really cool!
THANK YOU, Dear Readers, your visits are appreciated. Your visits also help provide some inspiration to keep improving the sidebar on this blog to provide you with a "one-stop-shopping" experience for your "big picture" weather prognostication needs.

The stats package I chose comes highly recommended. It's called Site Meter and you can click here to review its overall operation. Here are the stats logged since I installed the monitoring scripts:

Visits

Total .......................... 235
Average per Day ................. 23
Average Visit Length .......... 1:30
This Week ...................... 158

Page Views

Total .......................... 523
Average per Day ................. 40
Average per Visit .............. 1.8
This Week ...................... 281

Pretty impressive water vapor!

Okie, dokie, Weather Fans,let's take a look at the Northern Hemisphere water vapor patterns, courtesy of the US Navy. Gee, something tells me there's a heap o' water heading our way! All of the water taps appear to be working together right now. In football, I think they call this "piling on!" Right now, I have no clue how and where all this stuff is going to smack our continent. But its a pretty safe bet that somebody, someplace is going to get smacked real hard by this stuff. Definitely keep an eye on the jetstream, run those model simulations at least twice a day and rivet your attention to the march of the water vapor across the Pacific.
Some years it seems like Winter just has to end with a GIANT crescendo--kind of like one of those awesome epic symphonies that bring you right up out of your seat as every instrument builds to a nerve-pulsing finale. I am beginning to wonder if this winter is going to be what I like to call a Crescendo Winter. If so, batten your barn, buckle up your babies and hunker down, Nellie!

Some Late February Precip

The Snake River Plain is in line for a wee little bit of precip today. Those "pointy thing" (AKA: the Tetons) to our East will probably get some nice powder out of the deal. The Navy's water vapor maps show a lot of moisture boogie-ing across the Pacific. The QPF people show some decent accumulations progged over the next five days. One of our Official Blog Followers is in the crosshairs of that QPF in Brookings, Oregon. He left a great comment about how the storm impacted their location. Please read it below. Thanks, Dean-O, we sure appreciate it a LOT! Keep 'em coming! March continues to show hopeful signs of being a Precip Producer. We are now less than one month away from the official first day of Spring. Generally speaking, big winter storms decline in frequency and intensity after the Vernal Equinox. From that point forward, Old Sol is on a fast track to keep its appointment with the Summer Solstice a mere 90 days away. Enjoy these storms while you can--times, they are a changin'!

Sunday School Blow Up!

Greetings and welcome once again to another thrilling session of Sunday School! Today we're going to talk volcanoes. We'd like to give you a firm, fundamental footing on this volatile topic. Volcanic eruptions arguably have more of an impact on our climate than any other single factor. I say "arguably" because some people disagree with that theory. That's a political topic we won't cover in Sunday School today. The study of volcanoes could easily take over your entire life. Some geologists specialize int the study of volcanoes. For our purposes today, you simply need a good grasp on how to review volcano facts and know where to go to keep an eye on evolving volcanic activity. Afterall, this is Sunday School and we have recess coming up soon!

By far the easiest place to learn about volcanoes is Wikipedia. This amazing online resource has most everything an armchair layman would ever want to know about volcanoes. Click here to start your volcano refresher. You will see many links on this "gateway" page. If you want to see just how destructive volcanoes have been during recorded history, go to this link. The Big Grand Daddy of recent volcanoes was Krakatoa. The old funky drawing on this page shows Krakatoa before it disintegrated. There's a famous year in American History called "The Year Without A Summer." It's widely believed that this epic time period was caused by volcanic activity. You can click here to read about "The Year Without A Summer." Obviously, there's enough links from those Wikipedia pages for you to get involved in hours and hours of self-study. I'd recommend that you fully acquaint yourself with all of the Wiki resources on volcanoes. If you are serious about watching weather, you really need to be very well grounded in the science of volcanic activity. You also need to know how to track current volcanic activity.

Let's move into the tracking phase, shall we? As you might expect the US Geological Survey is the world leader in tracking volcanic activity. Click here to go to their gateway website. Be sure to bookmark that website. I think I will put it in the left hand column here, too. Check in on that website often--make it a regular habit, just like watching the jetstream. It's important to note that the mainstream media (that's defined as the media that's obsessed with celebrities and banal fluff) won't alert you to volcanic activity unless it's a huge event. In the meantime, minor volcanic activity can have a big impact on weather. For example, the Aleutian eruptions last summer received scant media coverage because the media was focused on the Obama-McCain-Palin-Biden quadrangle and who cared about some no-name volcano? However, those 3 volcanoes spewed enough stuff into the correct latitudes to really create a notable winter, a winter that generated all sorts of subsequent "media events."

Let's not rag on the media. Let's focus on improving your volcano-watcher skills. One of the largest concentrations of active volcanoes on earth is located on the Kamchatka Peninsula. As Gov. Winky Palin might say, "You can almost see it from Alaska." In any given year, the Kamchatka volcanoes have had and are capable of having an affect on our climate. It's a trifle difficult keeping track of Kamchatka volcanoes because of the language barrier. The graphic on this page shows just how many volcanoes are clustered on Kamchatka. Pretty impressive, eh? Click here to read about KVERT. KVERT is the Russian equivalent of the Alaska Volcano Observatory. Theoretically, the USGS and AVO work hand-in-hand with KVERT. One hopes that such cooperative efforts continue and remain productive and friendly. Luckily, satellite technology really unveils the activity and impacts of volcanoes in this day and age.
There are many more ways to track volcanic activity. However, let's not ramble too much farther here today--it's now Recess Time! Thanks for attending Sunday School this week. Now GO PLAY!

Redoubt update

Alaska's Mount Redoubt has been pretty quiet the past few days. The above graphics are the seismic data. You can see how the shaking and rumbling has taped off recently and is nice and tame. The AVO--that's Alaska Volcano Observatory--still feels like Redoubt is a likely candidate to erupt within days or weeks. You can visit their special redoubt website and read about their "scenarios" for Redoubt. They feel a repeat of the 1989-90 episode is most likely. Click here to visit that page. Remember, click the small images to see bigger ones.