A lot of Californians spent the first week of 2008 preparing for a storm. This included us getting our fleet of boats ready. Having hardly seen any weather in a couple of years this is exciting. And after reporting on the La Nina predictions last fall, a humorous reminder that we humans really don’t know much about why weather exists.

When I got up this morning expecting to be woken by the sound of rain, there was none. It didn’t really kick in until after noon which was about 12 hours later than the talking heads predicted. It’s been about two years since we have seen significant rain around here. A dry winter would have spelled draught disaster so this is very welcome, although folks in the paths of mudslides probably will disagree. In the past 12 months we have only received about 3 inches of total rainfall.

This satellite image comes from 6pm on 1/4/08. It tells the tale of a large, wet, low pressure storm that is producing gale force winds here on the coast of Southern California and blizzard conditions in the Sierra Mountains. We are expecting from 3-6 inches of rain to fall over a three day period here. I look forward to a nice green Spring and hope those in the burn areas and those canyons subject to landslides remain safe.

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