Yesterday off the coast of Northern/Central California a classic coastal jet was observed on the Quickscat sea winds satellite. Here’s a composite image showing the jet (the gale-force winds indicated by the red and black flags).

The factors that influence coastal jet formation are numerous and somewhat complicated. However, the California coastal jet can generally be described as the interaction of the semi-permanent east Pacific high pressure system and the temperature-driven western US low-pressure system. For a good introduction to coastal jet formation, you can view “this”:1 web-based mini-course on the MetEd site (registration required, but free).

[1(MetEd Coastal Jet Mini-Course)]https://www.meted.ucar.edu/loginForm.php?urlPath=mesoprim/coastaljets#

If you are a fan of 3D programs, including Google Earth and Google SketchUp, you know how frustrating it can be to navigate using a computer mouse. Fortunately, a company called “3DConnexion”:1 (now owned by Logitech) makes an affordable six degrees-of-freedom controller called the SpaceNavigator — Amazon currently has it listed for about “56 bucks”:2.

I’ve been using it for about a month now and find it to be far, far superior to the mouse. It’s a bit complicated to explain how it works, so a demo is in order. A couple minutes of searching on YouTube comes up with a bunch of SpaceNavigator/Google Earth demos. Here’s one of the better ones…

And here’s a video of how the device works…

[2(SpaceNavigator on Amazon)]http://www.amazon.com/3Dconnexion-SpaceNavigator-3D-Navigation-3DX-700029/dp/B000LB41BM/
[1(3DConnexion homepage)]http://www.3dconnexion.com/