Here’s an example of a Yahoo! house ad for one of their Widgets — the product formerly know as Konfabulator.

Kompressor’s are out too. Coincidence?

I’d say, not bad for an internet ad. It would be cool (or creepy?) if the ad were customized on the fly based on a user’s zip code. I’m sure I have my current zip code on Yahoo! somewhere… yeah, for My Yahoo!.

Here’s the placement of the ad on the original Yahoo! News page. It was a story entitled, Rose Parade Gets 1st Makeover in 117 Years. Pretty general article, but so is interest in weather.

Hey, the ad caught my eye, so it must be working for some folks.

I’d kind of like Widgets if Yahoo! would only fix the Widgets’ propensity to hog all the system resources on my Windows XP box. That, and I tend to have 40 million windows open at once. It would take a major archaeological expedition just to unearth my desktop.

Dual monitors, nine applications open and 13 windows scattered about. Hey, they call it a windowing system don’t they.

As I wrote about here, a huge, powerful dateline storm blew into the northwest Pacific late last week. Storms this large create large, long-period swells (ocean waves). The period of a swell is the time interval between waves. While a lot of storms are capable of generating swell periods in the 15 to 17 second range, only large storms with strong winds can generate swell periods of 20+ seconds.

This morning the swell from this storm started hitting the west coast of North America. To see what kind of period this storm generated, I’ve included a spectral density chart for the Monterey Bay off-shore ocean buoy number 46042. The spectral density chart measures the energy of the ocean waves hitting the buoy versus the frequency (the inverse of period).

This buoy sits in very deep water (1,920.0 meters), so is less prone to swell attenuation due to shoaling. That is, long-period swells are attenuated as they pass over shallow water like the continental shelf.

The area under the curve on the right of this chart represents long-period power, and in this case the long-period waves contain by far the most power (the power is a function of size and period). Most of the power is center around 20 seconds, but a substantial part of the power is in the 25 second range. Impressive.

Oh, and this is just the start. This swell will build all day (Tuesday), and will max tomorrow. With a high tide in the Bay Area tomorrow of around 6 feet, ocean front property owners should be prepared.

Zoinger says macking!

Last night it rained buckets at times in Northern California. However, that’s nothing. Here is this morning’s area forecast discussion from NOAA for San Francisco.

We will get only a short break between storms as the next system is already approaching 140w and will begin spreading clouds and rain over at least the n bay as early as Tue pm. By wed it will spread substantial rain Thru our district again…lasting into wed night. The GFS indicates the wed system will probably be somewhat wetter and breezier than the current storm with a good 1-3 inches in the N Bay and significant rain in all areas of the district.

After another break on Thu we get set for the biggest storm of the week beginning on Fri. The GFS and Euro bring in heavy rain and wind to the entire district Fri/Fri night and this is when our main flooding concerns will kick in. The models are consistent in forecasting a very strong diffluent jet over our area with copious subtropical moisture and a good deal of wind. Current model timing is for the heavy rain to move into the N Bay during the day Fri and spread over the rest of the district late Fri aftn thru the night. This storm looks easily capable of producing 2-6 inches of rain in most areas of the district in the 24 hour period Fri/Fri night with locally heavier amounts in the hills. This is almost certain to cause flooding in the N Bay…probably in the Santa Cruz mtns…and possibly just about anywhere else in our region.

Yeah, you sometimes need a translator to understand what they are saying. The GFS and Euro are numerical weather models used in forecasting. A diffluent jet means the jetstream is spreading out which supports low pressure and atmospheric instability (ie, precipitation).

A great site for checking on the near-term precipitation forecast is NOAA’s Hydrometeorological Prediction Center. A usefully subpage from this site is an aggregation of the quantitative precipitation forecasts, which you can find here. For example, here’s an image of the five day quantitative precipitation forecast (QPF).

You’ll notice that the amount of rain increases rapidly as you move up the California coast. This is typical of winter storm systems where it might be completely dry south of Monterey, while raining buckets up the north coast.

Out near the dateline this 947 mb monster. Looks like the biggest storm since 97/98 El Nino years. Interesting since the El Nino indicators are neutral right now or even weak La Nina.

So, I finally got the new Yahoo! Mail beta on one of my accounts. It’s the OddpostAjaxDHTMLWannabeOutlook interface for Yahoo! Mail. It’s really slick… but is kind of slow on my current computer.

However, on my friend’s new Dell (that cost something like 8 hundo), it rocks.

2006… time for a new rig.