Central Californication is getting some extended rain showers as a low pressure system off the coast stalls. This low is pumping some pretty good tropical moisture too as seen below.

Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the “smoking gun” of global warming, one of Britain’s leading scientists believes. - Friday, 23 September 2005

Three years later…

2008 Atlantic Hurricane Season Withers on the Vine

Perhaps the climate of the earth is really a nonlinear, coupled, chaotic system that we really know very, very little about? You know, kind of like the weather.

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 want to know how they remotely measure sea winds, “here”:1 is a link to a good mini course on it from the “MetEd”:2 site. You have to register, but it is free.

[1(Sea Winds Course Page)]http://www.meted.ucar.edu/npoess/ocean_winds/

[2(MetEd Homepage)]http://www.meted.ucar.edu/

Remnants of former hurricane Cosme are going to pass close to Hawaii later in the week. It won’t be up to much, so at worst probably just some winds and rain. Here’s the forecast track from the hawaii.edu “storm page”:1.

[1(Hawaii.edu storm page)]http://www.solar.ifa.hawaii.edu/Tropical/