Rain season begins

Last night around midnight, I noticed an unexpected spattering of rain drops. It was not enough to register as rain on the gauge, but it would certainly have made drivers switch on their wipers.

This morning, we were greeted with amazing rainbow weather. I took this photo (click to see full size) and video (below) before leaving to drop off the kids. I wish I had taken my camera along, because there were plenty more gorgeous rainbow vistas along the way. By 8:30 enough rain had fallen to moisten the sage, and there was that wonderful fresh desert rain smell in the air.



We got a decent shower, in and out, over the course of the morning. So far we have accumulated the first 1mm (.o4") of the season. Listen carefully for the first inklings of distant thunder in the beginning of the video below (taken around 7:15am). At a bit past noon, we had a great peal of thunder, rolling along the hills from west to east, and lasting for much longer than normal; perhaps 10 seconds or longer.



By now the sun has come back out, and it feels like LA summer again.

Rain wrap-up 2008

The rain season of July 1, 2007 to June 30, 2008 ended with 23.64 inches recorded on the Stonehill News weather station. This is the fourth complete year that I have been accurately logging precipitation. As mentioned last year, my neighbor at the top of Stonehill has been keeping records since 1999. I haven't compared notes with him yet this year; I'll update his column once we do. Here are the available seasonal totals from both stations:

Season    PacRad     SHN
1999-2000  19.76"    --
2000-2001  21.22"    --
2001-2002   8.27"    --
2002-2003  24.47"    --
2003-2004  15.47"    --
2004-2005  62.56"   61.61"
2005-2006  24.06"   23.35"
2006-2007   6.81"    6.15"
2007-2008  26.04"   23.64"

Here are the previous wrap-up posts:
Rain wrap-up 2007
Rain wrap-up 2006

Re-greening of burn area at top of Lake

Local photo blogger, Petrea Burchard captured a nice comparison of the burn area at the top of Lake, just after it burned and after a winter of rain:

http://pasadenadailyphoto.blogspot.com/2008/03/naked.html

What the hail?!

A brief hail "storm" hit Altadena, CA on Saturday, March 15th, 2008.



This little March event was NOTHING compared to the October 17, 2005 hail storm we had. Here are the two posts with links to video of that one.

http://blog.stonehillnews.com/2005/10/hail-stones.htm

http://blog.stonehillnews.com/2005/10/hail-all-hail.htm

Wind-powered Blackout

As far as I know, we still have no power this morning (I'm in a Starbucks). According to Steve Gerow, the Edison message from last night estimated power being restored by noon today. My rough estimate from a walk last night is that the blackout area was all of Loma Alta east of Sunny Oaks and all the side streets off Loma Alta along the same stretch. Zane Gray and Rubio Crest were lit up as if nothing happened. I didn't walk around the bend towards Noyes, so I don't know how far east it really stretched. A few of us saw a truck driving around last night with a spot light, presumably looking for downed lines. My weather station computer stayed on battery power until about midnight. The image above is the last one it uploaded before the network went down.

[10am Update: Got back to Stonehill and found power had come back at about 8am. Updated wind gust chart above shows additional weather station logging all the way through the windstorm, and then a gap until it came back to life when the power was restored this morning.]

Yesterday's high over 109 °F

Yesterday the Stonehill News weather station recorded a high of 108.1 °F but we lost power and Internet during the hottest part of the day. The mercury thermometer topped out between 109 °F and 110 °F (approximately 109.5 °F, but I don't want to state it too precisely as the mercury thermometer has lower resolution than the digital one).

ID	Location	High
KCAALTAD1	Top Of Lake Ave	108.3 °F
KCAALTAD2	Stonehill Dr	108.1 °F
KCAALTAD3	N. Mount Curve	104.1 °F
KCAALTAD7	Zane Grey	104.4 °F

The other three Altadena weather stations all seemed to have stayed online through the day yesterday. Above are yesterday's local highs as recorded on WUG.

Last year, July 22 is the day (not) to beat with a high of 112.5 °F recorded at Stonehill News.

It seems that we may have the dubious distinction of being the hottest place in Altadena =)

I considered the possibility that my temperature gauge was out of calibration, but it generally agrees with the mercury one. I guess it's possible they're both reading high, but not likely. They are both positioned in the shade on the north side of the garage, and never see direct sun. Assuming that the thermometers are reading correctly, I assume that there is some micro climate effect having to do with the orientation of the Gooseberry Canyon (watershed)

Summer Rain

What month is this again?!

Weather

The graphs and data on this page are updated every five minutes.
The raw data is also submitted to Weather Underground every five minutes.

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Running 5-day Temperature:

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Running 5-day Pressure:

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Running 5-day Rain:

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Running 1-day Wind Speed and Gusts:

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Running 5-day Wind Direction, Speed and Gusts:

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See photos of the weather station components.

Weather Station

The hardware is the discontinued WM918 kit from Oregon Scientific. These are the Tech Specs.

The software is Virtual Weather Station from Ambient Weather

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Anyone may link to our weather images. A fresh version of each one is automatically uploaded every 5 minutes (assuming everything is working right, which is most of the time). If you use an image on a public site, I'd be grateful for a link-back.

Rain wrap-up 2007

The rain season of July 1, 2006 to June 30, 2007 ended with 6.15 inches recorded on the Stonehill News weather station. This is the third complete year that I have been accurately logging precipitation, but my neighbor at the top of Stonehill has been keeping records since 1999. Here are the available seasonal totals from both stations:

Season    PacRad     SHN
1999-2000  19.76"    --
2000-2001  21.22"    --
2001-2002   8.27"    --
2002-2003  24.47"    --
2003-2004  15.47"    --
2004-2005  62.56"   61.61"
2005-2006  24.06"   23.35"
2006-2007   6.81"    6.15"

I find it interesting that he consistently logs a small percentage higher rainfall. The PacRad rain guage is 750 feet due North and 100 feet greater elevation. (see map)

42 mph gusts over the weekend

Saturday night/Sunday morning's overnight gusts put last year's unseasonable June gusts to shame. Last night gusts dropped from a top speed of 42 mph to 25 mph. So far tonight has been quiet and normal, but there's still time some bluster before morning.

Rain wrap-up

The rain season of July 1, 2005 to June 30, 2006 ended with 23.31 inches recorded on the Stonehill News weather station. Unfortunately, I didn't get around to resetting the total on the weather station until today, and we got a millimeter (.04") of rain on Aug 4. So my seasonal reading is off by a millimeter… oh well, 23.35" it is then. This is only the second complete year that I have been accurately logging precipitation, but my neighbor at the top of Stonehill has been keeping records since 1999. Here are the seasonal totals from both stations:

Season    Theirs   Ours
1999-2000  19.76"    --
2000-2001  21.22"    --
2001-2002   8.27"    --
2002-2003  24.47"    --
2003-2004  15.47"    --
2004-2005  62.56"   61.61"
2005-2006  24.06"   23.35"

Unseasonable isolated gusting

This morning we were awoken by Santa Ana-like wind at about 5:40am. We had uncharacteristic gusting up to about 20mph until about 8:45. The wind was hot. I talked to some folks who live in Pasadena this morning, and they reported nothing unusual further down the hill. Other Altadena stations recorded similar gusting, although not as strong. It appears that the Weather Underground servers were down for over an hour starting about 6:30, as all three Altadena sites reporting today ( 1 2 3 ) have a data gap there.

June 3, 2006 hits 103 °F

Well, it's really summer now. We just missed a high 103 up here on the hill today.

Other local stations report similar highs, but KCAALTAD3 on Mount Curve seems to either be having technical difficulties, or knows something we don't know. Also, unfortunately, KCAALTAD5 seems to have gone offline sometime after lunch, but not before they posted the highest high for the day at 103.1 °F

KCAALTAD1 102.4 °F
KCAALTAD2 102.9 °F (Stonehill News)
KCAALTAD3 _94.0 °F (?!)
KCAALTAD5 103.1 °F

Seasonal Wind Storm

As you can see from this chart, we've been having one of our regular winter wind storms since about 2 pm yesterday. It really started to get going around nightfall, and then got quite intense overnight. Not too many people slept soundly in greater L.A. last night. So far our maximum gust has been recorded at 41.6 MPH. Lots of trees and branches are down, flaky power and utilities everywhere, the usual. These are the so called Santa Anas winds. Other reports indicate that we have not been getting the brunt of the Santa Anas, with other communities seeing nearly 70 MPH gusts.

Lucky me, I have not actually lost power for more than a few moments so far. The "logic" of wind driven power outages is never clear. For instance, I couldn't gas up at the local Chevron this morning and the traffic signals are down a few blocks away, but for once my utilities are mostly still up. My power has fluctuated enough to make the clocks start blinking, but all my computers, and network gear are surfing through it on the UPSs. I did lose one of my internet connections for a while, but my backup DSL is still holding.

Check out this 3.7MB video of the anemometer going nuts.

Here's another 3.7MB video of the blowing trees behind our house.

Weather Underground

It looks like Altadena has become a hotbed for personal weather stations. As of today Weather Underground is displaying data from four stations in Altadena. I note that the station IDs skip a number so chances are we will see KCAALTAD4 come online soon, if they can figure out how to get hooked up.

Weather Underground Tips & Tricks:

1. Check out the new feature that allows you to view Personal Weather Stations using Google Maps.

2. Using a tabbed browser, open up each of the four stations in tabs.

• KCAALTAD1
• KCAALTAD2
• KCAALTAD3
• KCAALTAD5

Carefully scroll each page down so the graphs are showing and all aligned with each other. Click from tab to tab and observe the similarities and differences in the Altadena foothills micro (nano?) climates. Note: If you have trouble with one of the pages being a tiny bit off alignment from the others, try reloading it. Some of the banner ads are shorter than normal.

Hail all hail!

My buddy emailed me this video (3MB), and this video (2MB) of the hailstorm. At Stonehill News we have now heard reports of similarly large hail ranging from Old Town Pasadena, to JPL, and to Hastings Ranch. If anyone has a report farther flung than that, please let us know.

Most old-timers seem to agree that these were the largest hailstones seen in this area for as much as 60 to 90 years. One ornery, senile old-timer says no way man, he's seen hail almost the size of golf balls, big enough to dent a car. But he lives out of state now, so I guess we can give him his fish story for old times' sake.

Hail stones

We just had a fierce downpour with 3/8" to 5/8" dia. hailstones. It only lasted a few minutes in total and I was so stunned by the intensity, it took me a few extra moments to even think about the camera, much less to get it out. By the time I made this video (3.5MB), it had started to taper off a bit. Take a look at the pictures too

As of this minute we've had over two inches of precipitation since midnight. The season total so far is 2.87" at 1552 feet.

Rain begins in earnest

Saturday night and last night we had our first real rains. We already had a third of an inch on Sept. 20, but this system has delivered five times that already. Sunday it didn't rain much during the day, but it was consistently overcast with intermittent thunder storms.

First Rain Measured

The first millimeter of rain for the season was measured at 2:56AM Tuesday, September 20th, 2005.

First Rain

The roofers finished up Sept 9th. Not a moment too soon. It remains to be seen if the rain we are receiving right now will amount to enough to register on the rain gauge, but it is most definitely raining here tonight. The rain guage resolution is 1mm (.04"). While the rain we have had so far tonight has not been enough to register, I am awake listening to gentle rainfall and distant thunder. There is water running off our brand new roof. I couldn't be happier.

A Close Shave

We were woken up at 2:30 this morning by thunder! Our roof looked just like you see here. There was intense lightning half a mile away, but we have a huge tree above, and we decided in the heat of the moment that the tree was likely to work as a pretty effective lightning rod. Norah and I scaled the roof under surprisingly bright skies and laid spanning lumber and rolled out plastic in the middle of the night. I guess that the excellent visibility was due to the city lights reflecting off the clouds. We were finished by 3:30 am. It only sprinkled on us for less than a minute, and was so light that it didn't accumulate anywhere. Even still, I had no way of knowing we would get off that easy. As soon as I felt the first drops, the 2x6 lumber I was hauling became feather light. I had reports on Sunday and Monday from people only a few miles away who saw "significant downpours" for up to half an hour. We got off easy this time. Needless to say, we picked up the pace on finishing the roof :)

Hip to be Square?

Well maybe it was all the rain we just had that sparked the interest, but it seems that reporters have locked onto the personal weather stations in Altadena. A couple months ago, we were interviewed for an article in the Altadena Heritage Foundation newsletter, drawing attention to them, and just today we made the front page of the Pasadena Star-News under the headline "The Weather Underground". I take it as a badge of honor that the story ran side-by-side with the headline "Revenge of the nerds" featuring a picture of a hottie sporting a tiny-t emblazoned with the slogan "I [heart] Dorks" :)

End of the rain year

In Southern California, the official rainy season ended last night at midnight. Here at Stonehill News we measured 61.61 inches for the season. This total is closely corroborated by nearby personal weather stations.

Eric Malnic, Staff Writer for the Los Angeles Times, complained yesterday, "The epic 2004-05 rain season comes to an end at midnight tonight, and downtown Los Angeles missed the all-time record by a measly 0.93 of an inch."

He goes on to note,

This rain season, which ran from July 1 to June 30, ends with 37.25 inches falling at the National Weather Service monitoring station at USC. The wettest season on record was 1883-84, when 38.18 inches fell in downtown Los Angeles.

But the rainfall was actually much greater in other cities in Southern California, especially in hillside communities.

Pasadena had 56.06 inches of rain this season, almost 10 inches more than the previous record of 46.62 in 1982-83. Burbank had 44.64 inches, compared with the old record of 39.39 in 1977-78. Canoga Park, with 41.50, squeaked past its old record of 40.19 in 1997-98.

With no long-term historical data to compare our readings too, I think we will have to conclude that the rain season of 2004-2005 is the season to beat at Stonehill News.