Winter Sunsets

Our so-far sunny winter also meant spectacular sunsets. More about this sunny winter in post below. BK photos.

Goodbye, Sun

It's hard--very hard--to get upset about sunny days. Especially in a place where there aren't that many of them (though I did look that up before we moved here in 1996, and statistically there were about as many sunny days here per year as in Pittsburgh. It just doesn't seem like it.)

But sunny days in winter--a string of gorgeous sunny days the likes of which we don't even get in spring, summer or fall--was wonderful, but also scary. This is supposed to be our rainy season. Sometimes the rains start in December, but they're always here in January and February, and often into March.

Those rains are important. Our dry, warm January extended south to San Francisco, and particularly into the mountains. Just that one month of little rain or snow may have condemned the Bay Area to some degree of water rationing this coming summer. We're not looking forward to fire season up here either. Last summer, after reasonable winter rains, the fires were extensive and very damaging.

And even though January was so extreme that it was impossible to ignore, technically we're in at least our second year of drought. Southern California has been in drought for much longer.

Up here, it seems we could absorb a sunny January, but of course there's global heating, and if this is the start of a trend, this entire ecosystem could change, with consequences I doubt anyone can fully foresee.

Of course it was hard to concentrate on ideas of doom when the sun was shining, with blue skies and that carress of sweet air, just a little cooler than the feel of the sun that we normally get mostly in the fall. The Golden State.

There was another bonus resulting from clear days: clear nights. What a treat to see the winter stars, especially with the recent conjunction of the moon at its closest point in years with bright Venus and brighter than usual Jupiter. The other night, it was the crescent moon--straight as a smile-- with Venus bright beneath it. I had to drive down to Ferndale that night, and they always seemed to be right in front of me, in the blackness above the thin ribbons of fog. When I got home just after 11 they were gone, but it was a cold clear night, very black sky, very white stars, and as I gazed up at Orion's belt---a shooting star!

We did get a few showers, but then the sun came back immediately, and I saw the biggest rainbow I've seen here--a complete arch, from somewhere near Mad River Beach, and fading into the Arcata Community Forest.

Well, there's rain in the forecast for tomorrow. Maybe we're just getting the season late. That's what happened in 2007--a dry January, a very wet February. Today was the foggy gray with some sun behind it that in other Februarys would pass as a pretty nice day. But after day after day of bright sunshine, it was kind of depressing. Though, of course, I'm glad.

Earth to North Coast

This is as close to a snow scene as we've had in Arcata, but
it's after a hail storm this past week. BK photo.

Cold and Quake: A Wake-Up Call?

In a relatively isolated, largely rural area, natural forces are seldom out of the news. Right now they're dominating. Like the rest of the country, we had an unusual January--in our case, it was sunnier, drier and warmer than usual. (Nationally it was the hottest January on record.) And like much of the rest of the country, our February has been much different: wetter (bringing rainfall to about double the average for the year to date) and colder (45 was the high in Arcata yesterday, and that's unusual).

The hail storm the other afternoon was also pretty unusual, in that it gave Arcata streets that winter wonderland appearance for a half hour or so. I was out in it, standing under the shelter of a tree for awhile on H Street towards Northtown, and saw one young woman dash out of her house to snap a photo, and a couple of kids trying desperately to make "snowballs" and throw them before the whole thing disappeared. I got home just in time to take a few photos myself. There was still a remnant of white on the ground when a hummingbird came by the feeder.

Snow and storms in the mountains have been a big problem. Some of the few roads that connect us with the outside world have been closed because of snow or slides. One storm knocked out power to a transmitter on Horse Mountain for the local ABC affiliate for days. Suddenlink, our new cable company, got the ABC feed in time for the Oscars Sunday, which explained the patches of black screens and silence where local ads would normally go.

In terms of the Big Picture, weather is naturally variable and there are trends that play themselves out for a series of years, but despite locally active Climate Crisis deniers, global heating is clearly changing weather patterns. As to near-term effects, the devil can be in the details. For instance, our total rainfall is about normal since July, but we've been experiencing different winter patterns for several years now, with the rain that used to fall over several months coming later and more intensively. That's bound to have an effect on life in the rivers, forests and fields, as has been seen elsewhere when, for example, the balance between predator and prey species has been upset, and migrating birds or birds hatching chicks at a certain time of year aren't finding the food they normally do, because the weather has altered insect cycles. And as the climate has grown warmer, some species expand into new areas, creating various kinds of havoc. All this can eventually affect us--food and water supply, behavior of wildlife, etc. I hope our scientists are monitoring this here. Anticipating the possibility of problems might help the area cope with effects, instead of being completely blindsided by them.

Earth sent another reminder Monday morning with a 5.4 magnitude earthquake about 35 miles off the coast and south of here, at 4:19 AM. I was still awake at the time, sitting right here at the computer, and Pema the cat had just come by to find out why. The ripple went right under us, and Pema lost her footing for a second. No damage was reported anyway, due to the distance of the quake from land--5.4 is in the "moderate" range, so it could have done some damage otherwise.

There was an all-day earthquake prepardedness drill at HSU a few weeks ago, which in itself was a step forward, although the only local newspaper that said a word about it--the HSU student newspaper, the Lumberjack--opined that it wasn't well organized, didn't involve enough people and was generally taken too casually. At one point a Coast Guard helicopter landed on the HSU soccer field. I happened to be in the vicinity when it did. I watched as the two people inside stood and looked towards where an ambulance and a knot of people were, but if there was supposed to be a practice run of stretchers or whatever, none happened while I was there. HSU President Richmond came by where I was standing, then went down closer to the field. I saw a lot of nodding but that's all. I walked away and a few seconds later, the helicopter was in the air again.

I'll say it again: for a place that has earthquakes and storms, there's no excuse for the apparently cavalier attitude towards prepardeness here. And when we get to really sustained and complicated crises like a pandemic, a well-constructed plan that everyone in the community understands could be the difference between life and death for hundreds and maybe thousands. But apparently this isn't interesting enough for media to hone in on it, or important enough for the public and public officials to give it priority.

This also started out as hail but McKinleyville got a couple of inches of snow Monday. (Eureka Times-Standard photo.) There's been a foot or more of snow in the hills nearby.

Our Sci-Fi Weather

The Eureka Reporter reports the explanation by the National Weather Service for the sudden windstorm that devastated the Humboldt County electrical grid on December 31. Some people in less than remote places were without power for six days.

Several storms came through from the Pacific during Christmas week. By New Year's Eve morning the latest bout of heavy rains and constant winds had died down, only a weak storm was forecast for early in the new year, and most of the county was breathing a sigh of relief because it seemed the worst had passed and the grid got through it fine. But then at about 9:30 am winds that are estimated at up to 85 mph hit various parts of the area, and did the damage.
They were brief, and didn't affect all areas.

Now the Weather Service says that it was such a rare weather event that there is no record of it happening in Humboldt before. A similiar situation happened in Portland, OR in the 90s, which weather types have been studying ever since.It's called a bent-back occuluded front. In this case the storm had indeed passed--the front was in Montery to the south and Sacramento to the southeast. But "rapidly intensifying" low pressure in the ocean off our coast actually sucked the storm front back--the front "bent" back to the North Coast.

This explanation came in a story about why the NWS didn't issue a wind warning, not the most intelligent approach to the phenomenon, since it's not clear what the Emergency Alert would have done. Here's a classic graph on the outcome: But by the time they realized how strong the winds would be, it was too late, Dean [of the NWS] said. "The feeling at the time was that the winds had already started, so people already had the information that it was windy."

Yeah, good thinking. But what about this weird event? Nobody has seen it around here until the 1990s and now it's happened again. The conventional wisdom is that weather is full of freak events. It's that tricky old Mother Nature, tsk tsk, chuckle chuckle.

Well, the weather is seldom original, and some humility is certainly proper, but global heating scenarios predict such freak weather, and if the oceans are warmer in places they weren't before, we may be in for more "freak" storms. For which, incidentally we are not well prepared, as this event makes clear. The power crews performed admirably afterwards, but the flow of timely information was spotty and inconsistent, and generally a failure. Missing the point even a week afterward ices that particular cake.

There was a terrible TV movie on a few months ago about a series of storms that wiped out various picturesque capitals of the world and threatened to be "the end of the world!" as the title indicated. It ran for something like 4 hours over two nights, so I taped it and we watched the highlights. Good popcorn trash tv, but science fiction is rarely without relevance to the undercurrents of mood in the present. Sci fi weather isn't just coming. We just had some.

While we're interested here in what makes Humboldt "this place," it's always necessary to remember how deeply this place is connected to the rest of the world. Our weather is made elsewhere, in warm waters of the Pacific, for instance. They call it global warming because it is a global phenomenon in cause and general effect, but just as it is also caused by accumulation of specific acts in separate places, the effects are felt differently in different places. Yet as a global phenomenon, it's useless to look at either the cause or the effect only in local terms.

That's also the case with other kinds of air pollution---specific chemicals released in the air here may have their greatest effects elsewhere, and vice versa, just as the acid rain caused by polluting smokestacks in the eastern states is killing the life in midwestern lakes and forests.

We are part of this world, even the sci-fi part.

Stormy Days

Another storm coming in tonight. We could get another 3 inches of rain over the next few days, and we already made the pbs news hour for rivers at their highest level in 7 years. With river and creek flooding, mudslides and downed trees blocking roads for various periods, the Humboldt County sherrif (also in charge of emergency management) has declared a stateof emergency for the county.

This reminds me of the last week of 1996 and first of 97, a rainy winter and a huge storm for New Years that resulted in flooding, mudslides and so on, washing out roads, virtually wiping out a community south of here, and when 101 was blocked on both sides and the airport was shut down, cutting the whole area off from the world.

That was our first winter here. The next was pretty wet as well, but none have been that bad until now.

The hummingbirds are hanging in, though. It's been a challenge keeping up with their intake of nectar from the feeder, although the wind blowing it around caused substantial losses, too.

I've been meaning to make note of a news story that's now a bit old, that the sci-fi channel is working on a new series called "Eureka," ostensibly set in our own Eureka city (although not shot anywhere near here, of course. Only movies set somewhere else are shot here. Like a forest planet in a galaxy far far away.)

Anyway, this series is about an isolated town that happens to harbor scientific geniuses doing super secret research for the government. Of course, this not only doesn't sound like Eureka, it doesn't sound like our government. What would they be getting these scientists to do? Prove global warming is a myth? Show by example that evolution is a phony theory? Figure out how to make sense of all the phone calls they're spying on?

This isn't the first time that our relatively isolated location has inspired fantasies of secret goings on. Thomas Pynchon (who may have lived in the area for awhile) used all kinds of Humboldt locations in his novel, Vineland. College of the Redwoods became College of the Surf, etc. and the forests hid entire secret military installations.

Of course, people hereabouts do say that in southern Humboldt there are entire towns that aren't on any maps. So who knows?

And of course, a bit north, Bigfoot. A famous personage here. There are even Bigfoot gasoline stations.

But back to the storms: so far we've had only a couple of very brief power outages, but they are more likely in this weather. We're high enough that flooding isn't likely to affect us, though it is remotely possible. There are lots of usually small creeks about. And it doesn't take much to block 101, especially south.

I recall that in 96 I was pleased to learn that the Arcata area is self-sufficient in diary products. I don't know if it's still true.

Weather or Not

Czeslaw Milosz, the 1980 Nobel Laureate in Literature, lived much of his life in his native Poland, but also much of it in Berkeley, California, where he taught Slavic languages. In 2001 he published an "ABC" book, a Polish form consisting of short entries organized alphabetically. Between entries for "Aosta" (a valley in the southern Alps) and "Aron" (a fictional character) is two paragraphs on "Arcata."

"Always a gray sky and ocean fog," he wrote. "I have been there a number of times and never saw the sun. Should one live there? Perhaps as punishment. Yet people do live in Arcata, because they have to."

Though published in 2001, the rest of this entry suggests his impressions of Arcata were formed a decade or more earlier, since he then discusses the timber industry as the reason people "have to" live in Arcata. But by the time we arrived in 1996, timber was no longer the dominant industry. Arcata's largest employer was (and is) Humboldt State University.

I have heard stories about what Arcata weather was like when the timber industry was dominant, especially about the smoke from the lumber operations, which darkened clothes hung on the line to dry. This had a familiar sound to me, because it is how people talked about Pittsburgh in the 1950s when the steel mills were dominant, and before pollution controls were instituted. It was said that downtown businessmen had to change their white shirts several times a day. (I was growing up thirty-some miles away, but I remember the flames shooting out of the mill stacks, and the smoke, on our rare drives to the city, mostly for baseball games.)

Did the smoke affect Arcata's weather? Probably to some extent. But as Milosz writes, because redwoods "require constant moisture, they grow in zones of perpetual fog." The North Coast is also known as the Redwood Nation, one of the last places on the planet with significant redwood growth.

However, almost all of the old growth redwood is gone (as we discovered to our sorrow shortly after we arrived), and much of the former redwood forest land is covered now with buildings and roads, pastures and cropland, rather than trees. Biologists realize that redwood forests contribute to creating their own weather, so the fewer trees in smaller forests could lead to some alteration of weather, perhaps even so great a change that the surviving redwoods will no longer have the conditions they need to thrive.

Factor in as well the ongoing shifts in climate caused by global heating, and the picture of North Coast weather is even less certain.

Nevertheless, weather and climate are major distinguishing characteristics about the North Coast. On the coast itself, temperatures stay in the same 20 degree band, shifting from 60s/low 50s in summer to 50s/low 40s in winter. There are significantly different microclimates even slightly inland (Blue Lake gets hot in the summer) and higher (up the mountain from Arcata gets snow some winters.) The lack of high heat in the summer was a major attraction for me, even more than the warm winter. We did research the sunshine: turns out that on average Arcata has about as many sunny days as Pittsburgh.

When we arrived here in 1996, the seasonal pattern was familiar to residents. I arrived in Arcata in the sunny blue blaze of fall. I remember being amazed at the softness in the air. The nights were clear, and the stars out here actually twinkle. The moon was so bright that, coming through the skylight, I could see myself in the bathroom mirror by its light. And there were some fantastic sunsets (though as elsewhere pollution may have contributed.)

Then came the rains. It turned out to be the rainiest winter of the seven I've experienced here, but of course we didn't know that at the time. We'd spent some time in Portland and Seattle, but this was not the same.

We had to adjust our clothing. Unlike Seattle, nobody here seemed to carry an umbrella. We didn't have a car that first winter, so after awhile we found relatively inexpensive full length waterproof ponchos. Margaret's was red, mine was black. She said I looked like Darth Vader, and with nothing showing but her face in the window under the hood, I thought she looked like a red Gumby.

That was the year of the New Year's flooding. For several days, the North Coast was entirely cut off from the rest of the world. Highway 101 was closed in both directions, and so was the airport. According to the newspaper, we were self-sufficient in milk, so I guess we could have held out for awhile.

That winter extended well into March, if memory serves. Once in spring we were at a house in the hills above Arcata, looking out a picture window as a storm started. There was lightning. Our host was startled. He told us to pay attention, because it might be a long time before we saw lightning again here. He was right.

That summer we learned the daily pattern: fog, sun, fog. And the nature of the fog was new as well. It wasn't this wispy stuff hugging the ground or floating like smoke up the hills (though there was that kind, too.) It was gray sky and maybe a wall of gray around you. That's when we learned the correct term: marine layer.

We got used to checking the wind direction, for rain from the north, fair weather from the south. We were both amazed at how things grow here. There is always something blooming. Eventually we collected some Gore-Tex duds, and got cars. There were other aspects to the North Coast dress code that aren't strictly weather related, but I did adapt partly due to the weather. I liked my t-shirts thicker, with long sleeves, and my sweatshirts and sweaters thinner. I got wool shirts, although I didn't actually wear them much. One way you feel at home in a place is when you dress for its weather more or less without thinking.

This winter I found myself being made a little nervous by all the great sunshine. It was too warm, and where was the rain? ( South to San Francisco, apparently, and around Los Angeles, draining into Death Valley.) The rest of the country was having a bad time, and I was counseled to enjoy our good fortune. But maybe I'd developed a weather eye for what's normal for the North Coast.

What weather experiences define the North Coast for you?