Hooray!!!

Maybe it's too early to be be jumping and shouting but the Santa Rosa Press- Democrat reports, "...Rain over the last couple weeks has filled area reservoirs to the point where the water supply levels at Lake Sonoma and Lake Mendocino have topped out at slightly over 100 percent.".

That's Good (Maybe)

Not looking good in Mendocino County, water- wise, but it's still early. Some weather guys think there's plenty of time left and that it will still turn out to be a wet winter and spring. One fellow goes so far as to say that some of the state's reservoirs and dams might get refilled. Let's hope he's right.

A Record Cold?

Weather.com showed the temperature in Eureka as 22 degrees when I got up this morning but that's not a record. This page says the record was 20 degrees in 1888.

The Seasons

Heard some guy on the radio the other day say something along the line of, "...when Winter begins...". He was referring, of course, to the official start of winter on the winter solstice. I believe that's December 21.

I don't see it that way. By my way of thinking Winter starts sometime around late October, definitely by November. Then, Spring starts February 1 and goes through until middle of May. Summer starts sometime from the middle of May. Fall starts mid- September and goes through October.

At least that's the way my mind and body sees it.

Special Weather Alert

Not for Humboldt, but I just stumbled into this special weather alert on Weather.com. Low pressure over the next few days will bring real hot weather to the Bay Area. It says some interior locations might get temperatures as high as 110. Yikes!

I have Willits and Ukiah listed as locations to watch, too, but there doesn't seem to be any alerts for them. Hard to believe this high pressure zone wouldn't heat up Ukiah if it's gonna scorch Novato and southward.

Rain Ahead

Good news from the weather service if it proves to be true, reported the Times- Standard yesterday. They say we'll have above average rainfall this winter. This, in contrast to my own gut feeling. I was thinking the other day it would probably be a very dry winter. Another one of those cases where I hope I'm very wrong.

Then again, if you look at their prediction, they give themselves a lot of leeway. Almost like the global warming Believers: Cover all your bases: We may or may not have flooding. We may or may not have a lot of rain.

We've heard these El Nino, El Nina predictions from the weather service before. Problem with me is, I never follow up to find how accurate they were. I'm wondering if there's any source for the weather service's old seasonal forecasts and what actually ended up happening. Don't know that I have the time or inclination to try and find such info myself.

Last Frost of the Year?

I'm wondering if this will be the last frost, at least in Eureka, this spring?

I was thinking the last expected day for frost was the middle of March, but I wasn't sure. You usually find rough estimates of the last day of frost in seed catalogs, but this table from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (.pdf file) makes it seem a little more complicated.

They break it down into probabilities and even further into low temperature expectations. So, the simplest way to put it is there's a 90% chance of the last frost date being around February 14. A 50% chance of it being around March 18 and a 10% chance of it being around April 19.

This seed catalog frost table says the last average frost around here in Spring is March 14. That goes along with my recollection.

I can't, for the life of me, remember when the last Spring frost was last year. Can anyone remember when that was?