Chris Barker wrote:
> That was my point, Larry. It's all hype. California has its share
> of poor weather just like everywhere else in the world.
Certainly true, although what one considers poor weather may vary. For
example, I live on the bay/ocean side of the coastal range, about 2.3 of
the way up the state, and we get a fair amount of fog/low clouds in the
summer. I much prefer that to the higher summer temperatures just a few
miles inland.
And if we don't get storms in the winter, we have no snow pack in the
mountains and no water in the summer, when it doesn't rain. So winter
storms are good weather.
But go ahead and put it about that we have bad weather. If not another
person moves here, that would be good.
> And now they're suffering another natural disaster, poor people.
>
Just as we have been overgeneralizing about English weather,
generalizations about Calif. are often very misleading. The UK as a
whole, including N. Ireland, has an area of about 245,000 sq. km., is
about 965 km N. to S. and 485 km. E. to W. California is about 411,000
sq. km., 1,260 km N. to S. and 560 km. E. to W. Calif. is quite a bit
bigger than the UK and way bigger than England.
And we have more extreme terrain, with large deserts, some below sea
level, and ranges of mountains much higher than anything in the UK. The
spine of the Southern Sierra Nevada is a string of 4,300 m peaks,
resulting in a stretch of the state over 300 km long without any roads
across. In the winter, that distance becomes over 450 km. and sometimes
more. Think of a range of mountains almost the length of England that
are impassable for several months of the year and tall enough that the
weather is very different on the two sides. And there are some other
rather serious mountains you probably haven't heard of.
This is not to brag, simply to point out that we have a huge range of
weather, often at the same time. Mike's pix of Crater Lake? Taken about
60 miles from the Calif. border. So, at the same time the hot Santa Ana
winds were blowing up those fire storms in SoCal, we had beautiful
weather here, with moderate to low fire danger because of some early
rain storms, and it may have been snowing in far No. Calif. Rain and
temps in the towns up there mean it was almost certainly snowing in the
mountains.
Yes, that's a major disaster in SoCal, and I'm very sorry for those
caught in it, and I sort of know whereof I speak. We had one of those
here in 1991, driven by the same kind of winds. "The fire ultimately
killed 25 people and injured 150 others. The 1,520 acres (6.2 km²)
destroyed included 2,843 single-family dwellings and 437 apartment and
condominium units. The economic loss has been estimated at $1.5
billion.^" We walked about three blocks to where we could watch part of
Oakland going up in flames. Awful and awsome. Very luckily, we were
upwind, although some folks in the neighborhood were packing rental
trucks in case.
However, even with the much greater geographic spread of files in SoCal
this year, it actually only involves a fairly small part of the state,
geographically speaking.
Moose
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