Weather Report

It's hot here.

Of course nothing like much of the rest of the West.  According to the LA Times, on Saturday it hit 122F in Palm Springs, 126 in Death Valley, 113 in Las Vegas, and at least 119 in Phoenix, where airport officials were monitoring temperatures because it would soon be too hot to allow airplanes to fly.

CNN even screamed in a headline that the temperature was approaching "the highest ever recorded on Earth."  The key word would be recorded, but it's an assertion the BBC reported, too.  Later Saturday CNN was concentrating on the death toll.

This huge expanse of heat wave, which began last week, is expected to extend well into next week.  And we are feeling it here as well--the first time a heat wave has included us.  It's nowhere near as intense as these places--but for us, a week or more of highs in the mid to upper 70s and into the 80s is unprecedented.  Our normally high humidity makes these temps seem hotter, and though by next week we may not be cooling down at night quite as much as we are now, we still have cool breezes once the sun goes down.  That's absent for much of the West, including most of California.  Temperatures in Phoenix are staying above 90 at night.

The same change in the Jet Stream that's apparently responsible for this heat and dryness is bringing rain to the East, including places where June was the rainiest on record.

Our heat spell comes as our North Coast area has officially been declared to be in drought.  We had a sunnier and colder winter than normal (I wore wool coats I haven't worn as often since I left Pittsburgh) and while the sunshine was cheery, it also made people really nervous.  It's our rainy season, and it wasn't raining.  We got one but really only one of our usual December storms,and though it had unusually fierce winds (it blew my basketball hoop apart), it brought little rain.  After that there was some stealth rain at night, a few rainy days in February, but not much more. Winter rain has been arriving later and later the past few years, and this year it just didn't come.

Recently it became official--this was the driest winter since North Coast records were kept.

In terms of effects, I'm expecting the unexpected.  But there will be effects, to the drought (moderate, so far) and to the string of hot days that this ecosystem is not used to.  But even in places accustomed to hot summers, the intensity of this heat wave is also something new.