Tales & Trails of a Traveling Wiseguy

Scientists have agreed that the baby boy is on the way. ...No, this isn't a gender reveal thing, it's weather. This past Thursday the NOAA declared that the conditions for the phenomenon known as El Niño (Spanish for baby boy) are in place. A warmer patch of water has been observed in the eastern Pacific ocean off the southwestern coast of the US and Mexico. The presence of this warm water shifts the pattern of the Pacific jet stream, resulting in wetter or drier, warmer or cooler weather across the US and beyond. Example coverage: Reuters article, 8 Jun 2023; Los Angeles Times article, 9 Jun 2023.



The "main" effect of El Niño is a rainier winter in Southern California. I quote main because it's the one you're most likely to hear about— because so much of the new & entertainment media is based in Southern California. During the El Niño season of 1997-1998, for example, Tonight show host Jay Leno did a shtick about El Niño basically every night for months. That winter LA logged 31 inches of rain, more than twice its average (link: LA Almanac).

Aside from wetter conditions in Southern California and the Southwestern US, El Niño also means drier and warmer than normal conditions in the Pacific Northwest across to the Midwest. Where I live, on the San Francisco Bay in California, it can go either way depending on exactly how the jet stream forms up. If it tilts up a bit to the north, it funnels warmer, wetter air toward us in the winter. That's the more likely pattern overall. But if the jet streams tips a bit further south, the SF Bay Area gets a dose of the northwest's drier winter weather.

Right now I wouldn't mind getting some warmer, drier weather. We've had tons of rain this past winter season. We even had a freaky burst of June rain this past week. And it has been cooler than normal for several months. I'm ready for some warm, dry, beautiful summer to set in!

Phoenix Getaway Travelog #12

I forgot to mention in my previous blogs about our weekend trip to Phoenix that I was surprised by how high gas prices were. They were even higher than California... at least vs. where I live.

When I bought gas for our rental car on Monday the cheapest Costco station was $4.399 (Costco shows prices in their app, making them easy to check and compare) and the cheapest station of any other kind I saw was $4.499. Back here in Silicon Valley yesterday gas at the nearby Costco was $4.249 and the cheapest non-Costco station in my part of town was $4.399.

This was surprising because California is so routinely maligned for having gas prices higher than the rest of the country. Indeed, gas is a lot cheaper in many other states. Why is Arizona now one of the more expensive ones? A quick search on recent news articles indicates that Arizona now requires different formulations of gas at different times of year in different parts of the state. Example coverage: ABC 15 article/video (28 Mar 2023). Right now Arizona is in a changeover period, and there's a demand spike due to Spring Break travel.

Today is the first day of Spring in the Northern Hemisphere. Here in California, in the San Francisco Bay Area, it doesn't feel like the first of anything. It's yet-another rainy day in one of the rainiest seasons ever.

Today another atmospheric river rolled into the area. It's not even the first of those... it's actually the twelfth atmospheric river this season. In the past when we had one in a season it was something to write about! Now we're on number 12. There's no indication this will be the last. Oh, and along with this 12th one we also had a bomb cyclone. I could tell something was astir today when gusty wind was blowing the rain sideways at lunch. Don't you just love these colorful names for weather?

At the moment the extended forecast shows clear weather this weekend. I hope that holds! We desperately want to get out to enjoy the great outdoors this weekend.

Related: The upside of all this rain? Less drought!

After three weeks of downpour here in California we are finally seeing the sun. Yesterday was mostly sunny thought it rained a bit overnight... and now the 10 day forecast shows no rain!

Among other things this means we can start getting back outside. Yes, though we love the great outdoors we are also its fair weather friends.

In particular I'm looking forward to hiking waterfalls trails as there should now be plenty of water flowing in them. The last several months everything was so dry. Even hillside trails are prettier now, with green grass everywhere instead of brown.

Keep reading: Are we out of drought now?

It's been rainy. ...Okay, it's more than just rainy, it's like a deluge the past week. Like, "Google reports an increase in searches for 'who is noah' and 'whats a cubit'" levels of rain.

I last mentioned weather several days ago, noting that on New Year's Eve we had to avoid flooded roads on our drive back from visiting friends in the afternoon. It turns out San Francisco got near-record rain that day, 5.46 inches. Flooding has been a problem in many places around the Bay Area. We're safe from flooding here because we're not in a) a low-lying area, b) near a creek, or c) near a steep hillside that could give way when totally water logged. Oh, and d) we get way less rain than SF proper or various other cities in the Bay Area.

But today we've already had over an inch in the past 24 hours, with more expected. And not just more expected today but nearly every day in the 10 day forecast:



Yikes!

On the one hand, sitting inside— and wondering how bad the roads will be when we go out— through days of rain is no fun. On the other hand, as I say almost every time I give the good/bad news on rain, we need the precipitation. California's in a multi-year drought. A few weeks of heavy rain will not fix how low our reservoirs and groundwater supplies have gotten. They absolutely help, but it'll take this plus a lot more to end the drought.

Numbers-wise, the rain so far puts us well ahead of our season-to-date average. We're at close to double what we usually get by this point. (Rainfall seasons are measured Jul 1 - Jun 30.)

We are not yet at normal rainfall for the full season. I mention that because there's a chance the rain dries up after the next 10 days or so. Something like that happened a year ago, when it rained a fair bit in December then dried up in January (2022), extending our drought for another year. By February we had 80-degree-plus weather. Patterns like that have happened in other years, too. So let's hope we get more rain in the next 10 days and for the following month or two. We need it!

And I'm content to trade off several weeks of dreariness right now for not having drought, water rationing, crop failures, and hydroelectric dam failures this summer.

It's been in the news the past few days how most of the US is suffering under colder-than-normal temperatures, with high winds and chances of blizzards. I've seen & heard lurid headlines like "Once-in-a-generation storm!" repeated numerous times. Extreme weather in most of the country is not the same as all of the country, though. Where's the weather comparatively calm? Out in California, for one!



This morning I was looking for a good weather map to convey the differences in weather between West, Central, and East. I thought it would be a color-coded temperature map. I couldn't find a good one of those, but instead I found this map (above). It shows where the weather is warmer than normal and where it's colder. The data format and color gradient here make it really obvious who's having nice days, relatively speaking, and who's got a special form of misery to deal with.

It now seems fortuitous that Hawk and I decided not to travel/couldn't find reasonable bookings to travel over the holidays. Flights are likely to be snarled across much of the US, roads will be dicey, and the weather will be worse than usual. Oh, we are traveling; but instead of flying somewhere thousands of miles away we're driving to Southern California. I.e., we're going from the most orange area in the map above to the one-step-slightly-less-orange area.

I noted yesterday that it's been cold here in the SF Bay Area. Most of that I missed because I've been elsewhere all but 2 days of the past 2 weeks. There's something else I missed, too. Rain. It rained a few times last week and the week before while I was out, and it's raining again this morning.

Not gonna lie, rain makes it dreary. But we need it. California (and the US west) has been in drought condition for several years. It's become severe. Rivers are running dry as reservoirs are at historic lows, and land in agricultural regions is sinking as groundwater tables are depleted.

Does this bit of rain help? Well, every little bit helps, but we need a lot more. Even after a rainy two weeks our total rainfall was still below seasonal average-to-date. With another half inch today we'll be right around average regionally. So now we only need three more months of this. Actually we need more than average, way more, to refill what's been depleted. Like, two years of above-average rain would be a good start.

Election Day is this coming Tuesday, November 8. I know how I'm voting for most of the statewide offices, Congress, and state legislature. As I noted a few weeks ago, those choices are pretty easy; nearly every race pits a credible Democrat against an anti-government, election denying Republican. But one part of the ballot I need to do more research on is ballot propositions.

Ballot propositions take more effort to research before voting on because they can be tricky. It's already tricky because there are different types of propositions, as I outlined recently. But even more than that, propositions can be problematic in a number of ways. Here are 5 common problems:

1) They're written by amateurs, and contain illegal, impractical, or contradictory language. It's both a strength and a weakness of the initiative process that anyone can write one and, if they pay for signature-gatherers to get enough people to sign the petition, get it on the ballot sent to California's 22 million registered voters. The good is that it's a mechanism for citizens to bypass a legislature that is unresponsive to the majority of the electorate. The bad is that the props go through minimal review, and there's no deliberative process to improve them. Whatever is submitted is what's on the ballot, and we voters can only make an up-or-down choice.

2) A laudable goal with a deeply flawed implementation. The implementation of an otherwise worthy goal doesn't have to be illegal or infeasible to be a problem. Sometimes it's just plain bad. For example, years ago I supported the goal of funding stem cell research in California. But the initiatives to encourage it funded 10 years of research grants with 30 year bonds. Things like research grants should be funded out of current-year accounts. Leave long-term bonds for genuinely long-term things like building schools, roads, and bridges. Part of the problem with initiatives like this is that an up-or-down vote doesn't send a clear message. If I want to support stem cell research, do I vote Yes despite the problems? Or do I vote No knowing that if the measure fails many politicians will take it as, "Californians have spoken, and they've don't like stem cell research"?

3) Spending requirements tie the hands of the legislature. Many of the initiatives over the years have been of the form, "At least X% or $Y of the budget must go to this worthy goal." In addition to the problem of how up-or-down votes could be interpreted (see previous point) this also has the problem that, when successful, these measures put more and more constraints on managing the state budget. In years when tax revenues are tight the state government finds that 90% of its spending is locked in by law. This means that other popular programs must be cut because there just isn't enough fungible budget to go around.

4) Special interests disguise the initiative's impact. Given that anyone can write an initiative and there's no deliberative review, when moneyed special interests write them they generally try to conceal the true intent or impact of the measure. A prop could talk about "consumer choice" when really it's about removing important health regulations, or levy a "sin tax" on something like smoking or gambling people broadly want to see more regulated— but the tax proceeds go to help some other big business (i.e., the one that wrote the measure). At least once in the past 20+ years I've been fooled by a sneakily written ballot prop that I didn't spend more than a few minutes researching, and I voted wrong.

5) Complex, granular issues that are beyond the ability of 99% of voters to properly evaluate. Props can be big or small, simple or complex. Some of them are very complex, or have very wide-reaching consequences, which the vast majority of voters are unable to sort through properly. Many props I look at and I'm like, "I really wish this could go through the legislature." The legislature has not only a deliberative process to improve bills but numerous professional policy experts and lawyers involved in said process to understand its impact and feasibility.

After reading this list of problems with propositions it's tempting to take the stance, "Vote No on all!" Or at least, "If in doubt, vote No." But this is a problem, too!

The problem is not all ballot props are the same. While some are voter-written measures subject to any or all of the problems I've described so far, there are other types of props. In particular, referendum props— which are voter veto measures on legislation passed by the state assembly— really should be a case of "If you're not sure, vote yes." And bond measures proposed by the assembly go on the ballot because they have to. The legislature's not trying to hoodwink you by putting funding for schools, roads, and bridges there— though political opponents routinely claim they are, BTW. They're doing it because the state constitution requires it.

Bottom line, California's initiative process brings the good with the bad. Conscientious voters must read all ballot measure carefully to understand what they're voting for— or failing to vote for.

Have you ever felt like you're unaware of a seasonal weather change? Have you ever felt like you're aware of it now but somehow didn't notice for, like, the past several years? I have the latter feeling right now. We're in the middle of Autumn here in the SF Bay Area, and I'm like, "LOLWUT?" I feel like I've never seen Autumn weather here before!

There's an element of reality in that. California's climate gives us two dominant weather patterns. In the Bay Area our summers bring predictably clear skies and warm weather. In the winter we have cooler temperatures, frequently overcast skies, and frequent light rain.

What's awesome about the summer is that it can go on for months. When I moved to California years ago an older friend who'd lived here for years quipped, "In California the 4 seasons are Early Summer, Mid Summer, Late Summer, and I Can't Wait For Next Summer!"

In between these long summers and the few months of winter are short spring and fall seasons. Like, usually just a few weeks; so fast a change that you barely even think about them. And that's what's disorienting about being in fall right now. We're having distinct fall weather... and it's lasting for a long time!

Fall here means pleasantly warm temperatures in the daytime with cool evenings. Most days have had highs of 72-80 F (22° - 27° C) while overnight lows have generally been around 53-55 F (about 11° C). We've had cloud cover most mornings that burns off sometime before noon. Light rain falls occasionally, maybe once every 7-10 days. This may seem like a reasonable fall weather pattern elsewhere, but here in California it's like, "Whoa, what's happening??" I'm not used to more than 2 seasons.

I got an alert on my phone yesterday afternoon that the state power grid was operating close to its limit. Shut down what electrical use you safely can, particularly raising the temperature on your AC, the message warned, or there might need to be rolling blackouts.

"Rolling blackouts?" I fumed silently. Those haven't been a thing in California since the summer of 2000... and even then they were a manufactured crisis created by malicious market manipulation by out-of-state energy companies. Could real rolling blackouts be a thing now? I was skeptical. I did up the AC setting a few degrees to be helpful, though.

Later last night I saw a news article explaining that the need for rolling blackouts was real and was narrowly averted— except for in a few areas. This LA Times article (6 Sep 2022) details how the state really was on the edge of its capacity. A few cities in northern California imposed blackouts for 1 hour, but it was not widespread.

The article also give a bunch of figures for yesterday's high temperatures. The high here in Sunnyvale was anywhere from 102 to 109 F (39-43° C), depending on which recording location you choose. Other cities in the Bay Area had temps over 110. And in many places the temperature set a record not just for the date of September 6 but forever. Like, many cities had never seen weather that warm in 70 years.

The forecast for today is cooler, only 97° F here. But then tomorrow's back to 100° before the heat tapers off through the weekend.