Chance of Lightning and threat of Mud

Surprisingly, LA is on Stormwatch! once again. I say surprise, because despite the numerous Doppler weather systems in HD with numeric suffixes, the weather guy was surprised that it had rained over night on Thursday. Since the skies were really overcast on Friday, I paid close attention to the forecast on the noon report. They said there would be 'sprinkles' through the weekend. Saturday we woke to find ourselves on Stormwatch. There had been torrential downpours, movie FX level lightning and mudslides in the burn areas. Either these weather forecasters have a warped sense of what sprinkles means or they need to go back to technology of 20 years ago. Accu-weather radar sans Doppler or HD worked just fine. So does looking out the window in a pinch. At least fire season has been put on hold for the time being.



Speaking of the weather and forecasts out here, these are observations from an old blog


December 2007


Dopplers and Weather Woes


For a city that has very boring weather most of the year, Los Angeles local news stations have a lot of high powered weather equipment. Most involve the word doppler. The least doppler intensive – at least by the name they use – is Live Weather Doppler Plus at Channel 4. Channel2 has Sky View Doppler Radar with Futurecast. That sounds both impressive and sci-fi. But the winner seems to be Channel 7’s Live Mega Doppler 7000 HD with forecaster Dallas Raines. I am not making this up. The problem is that when you have all this equipment and not a lot to do most of the year, actual storms make these forecasters and their stations go absolutely insane. The rain storm of the last few days was really bad. We didn’t lose power, but I’ve never had to walk in wind that strong. And I haven’t had that cold a soaking since I lived back east. But the coverage may have well included the phrase 40 percent chance of the apocolypse. This feed was picked up by CNN and Yahoo. The first of the worried e-mails from Philly came in while we were still at work. In addition to figuring out how to get home without getting wacked by falling tree limbs and palm fronds (those things are heavy) or LA drivers who spin out in a drizzle, we had to worry about our folks worrying. Criminey! The forecasters or futurecasters remain unrepentent. I think they’re drooling of the notion that LA will have a real rainy season this year.



October 2007

More on the Fires


I want to thank everyone who sent notes in concern over our safety during the fires last week. We were never in any danger from flames. I can understand why there was a lot of concern. The media maps of the fire used a an outline of the coast with a big flame over Malibu, but the scale of the map was such that the flame also looked like it covered Santa Monica and was really close to Venice and the environs where we live as well as some of our friends. In reality, we were more than 20 miles from the closest fire. Only our friend and former assistant Phil saw any action as we had to help evacuate the very pampered guests at one of those infamous rehab centers. I think he’d rather have run into one of those blazing canyons. What we all needed saving from is the fire coverage on the local media which is still only 48% contained. I know that they had to get information out to the affected areas. And I admit to joining my friends in the pool as to whether or not chuck Henry from Cannel 4 news would burn another newsvan. Here’s a paragraph on that from his Wikipedia article:Henry was once nearly killed in the field filing a report about California forest fires in October 2003. Although the newspeople were told to leave by the fire department, the NBC team decided to stay longer and were soon surrounded by flames. Their van was completely engulfed and lost to the fire and the team had to be rescued by the LAFD. Chuck Henry was later seen on air crying about the situation referring to the newsvan as a "Stupid truck, full of equipment."



This incident was parodied on a 2005 King of the Hill episode Gone with the Windstorm.
Incidentally, that’s one of my favorite King of the Hill episodes. And I didn’t know until today where the inspiration came from.


All of this was intriguing, but the news never told viewers where the shelters were or where the road closures were. They would refer them to websites. How in the heck are they going to do that while on the run? We had to look at the transit websites to figure out if we could get to work via our regular route. In the hours of couverage that we watched, I never saw a list of places or recources for evacuees. Nor did we see a full weather forecast which was supposed to be important to the firefighters. I gave up by day two.

More observations to come!