There was lots of fog this morning as I stepped out the door and we can probably expect it to stick around for most of the morning and possibly into the afternoon.
This will be the pattern for the week. There isn’t much more rain expected until the weekend.
Speaking of rain, I did some more digging over the weekend. What I found is that while 2012 still stands out as exceptionally dry July through September, our rain this October has put us well away from any records from July through October.
Here is the data: I looked for the years with the least rain between July and October from the main stations.
One thing I found satisfying was that where the City and Beaver Creek stations overlapped, they still agreed on their driest years, 1919, 1925 and 1936. 1925 was significantly different in the City than in Beaver Creek, but it was still among the driest years for both.
So the takeaway is that the three months July to end of September was the truly unusual stretch. With only 1896 showing that long of a dry stretch. But the rains this month have brought us back above the historic lows of the past.
Some more good news: you might notice that the Alberniweather webcam is back online! After being fed up with it for a while and then just not having time to fix it, I got it back up yesterday. Hopefully it lasts for awhile before dying again. It is frustrating when technology does not work because of poorly designed software.
The issue biting the camera is the Eyefi software ability to connect reliably to my wireless network and its ability to delete old images as it takes new ones to avoid filling up the card. I remain hopeful that in future the software will improve. Until then, I’ll keep it online as much as possible.
I also noted last week as I was driving over the Hump that there is what looks like a new electrical cabinet at the truck stop where the webcam usually is. Hopefully that means the webcam will return there soon and before the flakes fly on the Hump.
Oh and speaking of flakes flying: the winter forecasts are coming out now from the various agencies. They all agree that El Niño will have a very limited effect if it has any at all. So that means it is probably not going to be overly wet and warm. However, since there is no El Niño or La Niña to really drive things, the forecast becomes a little more uncertain. We will be at the mercy of shorter term and more variable patterns affecting the jet stream. I’m getting the feeling that we might see a little more snow at lower elevations than last year but that overall it will be relatively dry. We shall see.
Our first chance at snow might be Halloween, or maybe not… Hmmm… Maybe I should fire up the
2012 edition of the Snow Contest?
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