Forecast Jargon Decoder: Thursday Oct 3, 2024 Jargon: Compressional heating continues as masses of subsiding air continue to pour over the west coast today but at a slackening pace. In plain English, that means descending air from an upper ridge is descending to the surface, crushing the marine layer and pollutants to the surface while…
Forecast for Monday, Sept 20, 2024 Heat in the Central Valley is critical in producing the San Francisco Bay Area winds. That heat in the valley creates the low-pressure that produces the pressure gradient that sucks cool ocean winds through gaps in the Coast Range and over our launch sites. But too much heat can…
Forecast Jargon Decoder: Saturday Sept 21, 2024 The satellite imagery animation shows a rip-roaring eddy off Pt. Reyes with the lighthouse sensor SE 19g22! But the Sacramento pressure gradient is strong enough to turn those SW ocean winds into WNW winds 15g19 at Sherman Island. All this suggests I should just shut up and stick…
Preamble: Since the Bodega ocean buoy is NW 23g29, while the 449Hz profiler has average winds of 35 just aloft and my beloved Pt. Reyes is 23g3 I best will leave well enough alone: Sunday forecast: Powerful NW ocean winds obliterated the eddy and southerly coast winds as a massive, 3100 mile-wide North Pacific High…
Check out this forecast for Pt. Isabel and Berkeley today. When there is a heat wave and no marine layer or a thin marine layer that retreats fast, it becomes very difficult to forecast East Bay winds. This is because the hot air from the East Bay hills and the Central Valley extends towards Sherman…
The cams atop Mt. Diablo and Mt. Tam show a sea of fog blanketing the Bay Area with both the Carquinez Strait, Napa Valley and the Santa Clara Valley fog filled. This fog distribution, along with the barometers, tells us that there is a strong pressure gradient to Napa, Sacramento, Stockton and towards Bakersfield. So…
Forecast Jargon Decoder: August 3, 2024 A broad streamer of dense low fog blankets the coast and Central Bay, but it shrinks to a narrow steamer that only impacts the Crissy winds. A rainy Gulf of Alaska storm crushes the North Pacific High’s surface NW winds against the west coast. So the NW ocean winds…
The eddy off the Golden Gate is larger than when I issued my forecast, so we are seeing early, faster clearing due to the eddy’s SE winds. Despite that I am sticking to my current forecast due to the strong NW winds out past the Farallon Islands (18 miles west Gate). 7:30 AM forecast: A…
Has it ever offended your sense of aesthetics that on days I forecast, some sites have nice tidy tables for the time slot wind values while other tables are ugly and all chopped up time slots? Here is an example of a tiny vs ugly table. There is a reason for this madness. Some sites…
Forecast Jargon Decoder: Saturday, July 27, 2024 Take a look at today’s forecast, especially the mention of winds just aloft: In most of the USA, the winds ≈ 1000 feet aloft (975 MB) barely impact the summer surface winds, but when those winds are near topography, they become turbulent and sometimes swoop down close enough…