In this morning’s email, a message from Jim Andre (director of UC Riverside’s Sweeney Granite Mountains Desert Research Center) (reposted with permission):
Hey folks, not sure if I sent this link to you but we have a new real-time weather station in Granite Cove now and the conditions/data can be viewed at:
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/weather/ucgr.html
Of course there is also worthy weather news to report with this amazing storm. Storm total here since Friday is approx. 3.5”, all rain, and it’s been steady not too heavy yet, hardly any breaks really. It’s also been cloudy (mostly fog) 9 straight days, which might be some sort of record in my 18 years here. The largest single storm precip event here was winter of 04-05 when 4.25” fell in about 8 hours, that’s when Jan & Megan’s Toyota washed away (leading to several appearances on Click and Clack’s Car Talk)....this storm might surpass that single storm event as the more intense rain is still on taps later today and tomorrow as the low finally ejects east. I recall Bob Norris mentioning a 5” tropical system in Sept once….perhaps 1979, Kathleen? But we do not have an official record of that event since official GMDRC data goes back to 1986. So by end of day Wed. we might have a new official single storm record?
Many of our rainiest winters are during “La Niña” conditions, and we are positively in one now. I particularly enjoy this storm because it’s a classic “El Niño” pattern with a western Pacific split flow and moist southerly jet. If it WAS an El Niño year, my how the media and many climatologists would be hypin’ it.
Though we are getting an epic rain, we can’t claim to be the most outstanding locality for this storm has dropped more than 12 ft of snow at Mammoth, 10” rain in southern Owens Valley (valley bottom, incredible), up to 10” in some west Mojave locations, over 20” at Devore, and more than 25-30” in the coastal ranges from Santa Barbara and up through the Central Coast of CA. Tell that to the next boasting easterner that claims we Californians don’t have weather! Indeed some of the largest single storm precip totals in North America occur in CA during patterns such as this. Rarely do hurricanes exceed 20” of precip.
Jim
The Winter of Ought-Four and -Five Jim mentions was wet indeed. Here’s a photo I took that January, which long-time readers may remember; it’s of Silver (usually Dry) Lake just north of the Mojave Preserve, along the road from Baker to Shoshone:
And of course the wet weather that winter led to an astonishing growth of desert plants both native and exotic, which contributed to the worst desert fire season on record, in which a million acres of the previously fireproof Mojave and Sonoran deserts burned in six weeks or so. But we won’t think about that just yet.
We had an explosion of Desert cottontail rabbits here in the northern Mojave in 2005, they loved all the weedy growth. Death Valley wildflowers were a riot, maybe it will happen again this spring.
No maybe about it.
Lots of salad for tortoises and plenty of glires to keep the coyotes busy!
gotta see if I can get out there this Spring…
Do it, Sven. Bend heaven and earth. About time you showed me your old study sites.