Subject: [EDIS] significant rain event underway for northern and central california
Date: November 1, 2008 8:13:32 AM PDT
LOW PRESSURE OFF THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COAST IS PUSHING RAIN BANDS ONTO THE NORTHERN CALIFORNIA COAST BY DAWN SATURDAY WITH A VIGOROUS COLD FRONT EXPECTED TO PASS THE SAN FRANCISCO BAY AREA EARLY SATURDAY AFTERNOON. THE ATMOSPHERE TURNS UNSTABLE WITH THE COLD-FRONTAL PASSAGE AND A CHANCE OF THUNDERSTORMS WILL DEVELOP AT THAT TIME AND CONTINUE INTO THE EVENING HOURS. LOCALLY HEAVY RAINFALL IS EXPECTED WITH THE FRONTAL PASSAGE ACROSS THE AREA BEGINNING IN THE MORNING IN THE NORTH BAY AND EXTENDING THROUGH THE AFTERNOON FOR THE REMAINDER OF THE CENTRAL COAST. LOCALLY GUSTY WINDS AND HEAVY RAIN WILL ACCOMPANY ANY THUNDERSTORMS. HEAVY RAIN MAY CAUSE PONDING ON ROADWAYS…CREATING HAZARDOUS DRIVING CONDITIONS. AS OF 8:00 AM SATURDAY MORNING… RUNNING AND LARGER 24 HOUR RAINFALL AMOUNTS IN THE NORTH BAY MOUNTAINS HAVE BEEN 2.80 INCHES AT VENADO AND 1.35 INCHES AT HAWKEYE. IN THE COASTAL NORTH BAY OLEMA REPORTED 1.04 INCHES. IN THE NORTH BAY INTERIOR RAINFALL AMOUNTS ARE NEAR ONE-THIRD OF AN INCH. AROUND SAN FRANCISCO BAY AND PENINSULA COAST LARGER AMOUNTS ARE NEAR ONE-QUARTER OF AN INCH. IN THE SANTA CRUZ MOUNTAINS BEN LOMOND HAS RECEIVE ABOUT ONE INCH WITH THE LOS GATOS AREA RECEIVING ABOUT ONE-HALF AN INCH OF RAIN.
I was, unfortunately, out of town for a few weeks when the news of the Save the Bay trash rankings came out. In the rankings Permanente Creek ranks 18th and Stevens Creek 20th. There was a flurry of stories like this one from Palo Alto Online. This later Los Altos Town Crier story from 1 October outlines the impact that the trash rankings have on municipal governments.
Another big story over the month is the peripherally-related Hanger One story of reactions to the Navy’s proposal to strip Hanger One down to a frame. The Moffett Users blog is a good source for information as well as stories in the Mercury and Mountain View Voice. I can’t begin to summarize.
In other Moffett related discussion, this blog entry notes the Google development work planned at Moffett may add an additional bridge over Stevens Creek, and urges Google to consider using developed office space that is currently unoccupied.
The Mountain View Voice ran a story on the Cuesta Annex, location of an overflow basin for “fifty year” flood levels:
Afshin Rouhani of the water district explained that the flood basin is part of a system of flood retention basins proposed for Permanente Creek. The Annex would only be needed in a “50-year flood,” which has a 2 percent chance of happening annually. Water would have to fill the basin proposed for Blach School in Los Altos before it would begin to fill the Annex, arriving through a pipe that would run under city streets and enter at the southeast corner of the basin.
The water would flow out of the northwest edge of the basin after one or two days, Rouhani said.
Another Voice story reported on the developments for the Permanente Creek trail:
In the city’s quest to extend the Permanente Creek Trail over Highway 101, a $9.43 million tunnel under Old Middlefield Way was supported by a majority of the City Council in a study session Tuesday.
The club maintains the 51-year-old Stevens Creek Archery Range, buried in Stevens Creek County Park and straddling the border of Cupertino and Saratoga. The club works in cooperation with the Santa Clara County Parks and Recreation Department. Bowhunters Unlimited, for a small annual fee, maintains the practice range, the trails and targets through volunteer labor.
Save the Bay has a new interactive site for you to pledge actions that can help clean up and keep safe San Francisco Bay and estuaries. They have a list of site that will take pharmaceutical waste like that expired bottle of aspirin, to pet medications, to your prescription meds. Some of the sites take other household hazardous waste as well. Whether or not you are in the Bay Area, take time to protect your local ground water, lakes, streams, rivers, and wetlands. ground water, pharmaceuticals, safe disposal
First, a link to an older story about a Zeppelin possibly making use of Moffett Field. To my uninformed eye, that looks like a delightful co-use of the space, and my steampunk sensibilities prompt me to wonder if the bay area needs lots of zeppelins for disaster relief. About the time i ran across that article I found Steve Williams‘ site. He is “a pilot and aircraft owner from Mountain View. [His] goal for [his] web site is to record news and opinions about public use of Moffett Field, and especially civil aviation use.” He is such a well measured correspondent and his site provides such a useful service, i hope that civil aviation use can be found to have no negative effect on the wildlife refuge. He’s provided an update on the Hanger One report from the Navy, delayed until January.
In other news, the SF Chronicle ran an article about the release of the South Bay Salt Pond Restoration Project report with this supportive blog entry from a hiker. I wish i could have taken more time off from work to be involved in the report development, and wonder if i should volunteer to be on the Alviso Ponds & Santa Clara County Working Group. There seem to be no surprises. The Chron reports that, “Today’s plan favors converting 90 percent of the former ponds to tidal marsh,” and mentions the concept of adaptive management (explained in a KQED segment) and how that may change that target date as observations are made about the effects of the early changes. I’m personally delighted to hear that, “A 2 1/2-mile segment of the Bay Trail will open between Mountain View’s Stevens Creek and Sunnyvale for hiking, biking and watching wildlife.” The December Newsletter reports, “Next year should be particularly exciting as we plan to … open the segment of Bay Trail adjacent to Moffett Field.” I’m not patient enough to dig out an exact date, but i think the work i’ve been observing has been of trail development. I hope it’s soon. When i walk out to the bay on the trail beside the creek, i really enjoy the sense of being so far away from sub/urban life and the changing views of the Moffett Field buildings. I think this will be an exciting addition. I do hope that in opening it up to public use that the public can respect the wildlife habitat and that i don’t have any more encounters with runners with their dogs off leash. (Dogs are not allowed in the Don Edwards section of the Stevens Creek Trail.)
I found this interview with Marc Holmes to be particularly enjoyable. Admittedly, by giving an etymology of “skinny as a rail” as a comparison to the clapper rail, he certainly got my attention.
Changing Landscapes (6 min, mp3)
Marc Holmes, Bay Restoration Program Manager at The Bay Institute, talks about the natural history of San Francisco Bay. Marc explains what we’ve lost by draining the wetlands and what we will gain by restoring them.
To subscribe to this professionally produced podcast, see the links on their home page.
Admittedly, it appears that the OED disagrees with this derivation for the expression. “Thin as a rail” is explained under the first definition of rail, n:
1e. In various (mainly U.S.) phrases: to split a rail, to split timber for rails; to ride a rail (see quot. 1836); to ride (someone) on a rail, to punish someone by carrying him about astride a rail to be mocked; as thin (or lean) as a rail.
The first use cited is 1872 ‘MARK TWAIN’ Roughing It xv. 125 You’ll marry a combination of calico and consumption that’s as thin as a rail. While one might want to dispute that Twain could have been familiar with the Clapper Rail, the next usage gives a variety of expressions which thematically seem to connect rail to the narrow wooden bar: “1927 W. E. COLLINSON Contemp. Eng. 117 Here I will insert a few current comparisons which are in frequent colloquial use:..as thin as a lath or rake or rail.”
Curious, i checked for the use of rail for a bird. The earliest OED citations are c1450 Two Cookery-bks. 69 Votrellez, Rales, Quayles. 1483 Cath. Angl. 299/1 A Rayle, glebarius. a1529 SKELTON Col. Cloute 870 Some..by the barres of her tayle Wyll knowe a raven from a rayle. and, in the metaphorical use of the first definition, 1797 Encycl. Brit. (ed. 3) V. 596/2 The nævius, spotted cuckow, or *rail-bird, is about the size of a field-fare… It inhabits Cayenne… This..is seen often perched upon gates and rails, whence its name. .
KQED’s “Quest” show produced a segment on the salt pond restoration which introduces the concept of adaptive management and how that will be well implemented in the fifty year project of transitioning the industrial salt ponds into a variety of restored and managed habitats in the south bay.
The July-September 2007 issue of Bay Nature has some information on the restoration of San Pablo Bay wetlands and salt marshes (ie: North Bay) The full supplement is available as a 2.2 MB PDF. The October-December 2004 issue has a south bay report that may still be of interests for background reading.
salt ponds, wetlands, san francisco bay, don edwards, Don Edwards National Wildlife Refuge, adaptive management, salt marshes
In my mailings to SPCWC about the ways to distinguish Japanese and native dodders, i ended up corresponding with Susan Schwartz of Friends of Five Creeks. She echoed the color cue — “[Japanese dodder is] a slightly greenish gold; most natives are orange” and noted that the color in combination with the thickness was sufficiently distinguishing. She described the thickness as, “like angel-hair pasta, not quite as thick as spaghetti.”
She shared some more points (included below), most significant to my reach of the creek is that she doesn’t think it would do well in the salt marsh. Much of where i’ve seen dodder is fairly likely the saltmarsh dodder. (Bright orange and more thread-like.) (more…)
To get the cool unrelated bit out of the way: there’s a notice of the falconcam where one can watch the nesting falcons at San Jose’s City Hall.
It’s raining today, a pleasant surprise in such a dry winter. On this wet day, the Mercury is running dry news: “The Sierra Nevada snowpack is 46 percent of normal – the lowest this time of year since 1990.” Because of the drought concern, Hetch Hetchy’s owners, the San Francisco Public Utilities Commission, want users to cut back voluntarily by 10%.
I’ve always found the name of the San Jose Mercury apropos. Not only is Mercury the quick messenger, but the Almaden mercury mines were more profitable than the gold mines of California (at least, that’s one of the messages from the visiting the Almaden Museum).
The Almaden mines long been considered to be a source of mercury in the sediment in the bay: The Mercury noted, ” 2,698 pounds of mercury a year are thought to be released into San Francisco Bay, almost a ton of it from sediment on the bay floor and runoff from old Sierra gold mines.” Apparently, the mercury levels in the bay are so high that the fish are unsafe. I don’t think i’d read such a bald statement of the contamination before. The new news is that
new research by the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board has concluded that roughly 3,700 pounds of mercury a year are coming into the five Bay Area refineries in crude oil – and nobody knows where it goes after the oil is refined into gasoline.
It seems the refineries had been working with state regulators to figure out where the mercury was going, but have been lagging in reporting. It seems the news is simply that the regulators are stepping up the pressure on the five refineries to figure out where the mercury is going; not that there’s evidence that the mercury is definitely ending up in the bay.
Everyone should be concerned; what bothers me is that there’s no statement that the bay mercury levels have been … rising? falling? There’s this statement:
The bay is slowly cleaning itself. Every year, 2,698 pounds of mercury flow into the bay. But more than that – 3,086 pounds annually – is washed under the Golden Gate Bridge and diluted in the ocean, while an additional 419 pounds a year evaporate from the bay’s surface, according to the board.
At current rates, the board estimates it will take 100 years before fish are safe to eat again.
But that apparently is models and estimates. If it was actually measured, the issue around the refineries wouldn’t exist. There’s something of the sensational and something not quite scientifically sensible about the article.
First, i cycled out to the bay this morning and did not run across any vinca, despite trying to keep an eye out for it. (The glories of red-winged blackbird song!) I did see quite a bit of thistle, but wonder — in the artificial habitat of the salt ponds — if thistle is a welcome food for the the native songbirds. I did see vinca on the eastern bank of the creek on the low road between the two bridges.
In today’s Mercury there’s a brief article about the reintroduction of the Bay checkerspot butterfly to San Mateo County Park. The Wikipedia entry appears to be well researched and mentions the link between automotive pollution and nitrogen enrichment of the poor serpentine soils that make up the checkerspot habitat. The news article simply notes the 2001 project to eliminate the non-native Italian ryegrass in a 15-acre area of the park and implies that it has been successful enough to allow the checkerspots to return.
In the Mercury there is also an article about Santa Clara’s practice of selling GIS data at such a high price that only few other agencies can have access. I don’t know what GIS software Santa Clara uses, but — if it’s not an standard package but custom code — tax payers should consider the cost to them. That data belongs to citizens (with respect to the issues around Homeland Security), and it should not be so hard to get at. And more and more citizens have the abilities to make good use of the data, as well. UPDATE 2007-04-04: The first issue of the BAAMA Journal has an article on this case.
Last week, i remember with pleasure driving out of my workplace and seeing the snow capped peaks across Moffett Field and the bay. While Mission and Monument peaks (2517′ and 2594′ respectively) didn’t have snow, the ridges behind them did. Black Mountain and Mt Day (3951′ and 3869′) are deep in the Ohlone Regional Wilderness, yet just twenty miles away as a direct line on a map.
On Tuesday, i was returning with colleagues from lunch and the haze over the bay was so dense that we couldn’t see the silhouette of Mission and Monument Peak. Yesterday the haze may have been a little relieved, but not by much.
I’ve finally noticed the air quality in Redwood City information box at Weather Underground. Yesterday was noted “Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups” due to the high content of fine Particulate Matter (PM2.5). There’s no historical data, so i turned to the Bay Area Air Quality Management District site to discover that yesterday was a “Spare the Air” day. (I also found the historical data for Redwood City and for Central San Jose, confirming my belief that Tuesday was much worse than Monday.)
I was struck with sudden frustration at how limited the alert system is for Spare the Air days. I’ve heard announcements on the AM station, but that’s usually when I’m in my car — a SULEV, so i don’t feel too miserably guilty. How to know more in advance, especially as we have a fireplace, and wood burning significantly degrades winter air quality?
Dear Webmaster at Bay Area Air Quality Management District:
I would love to be more promptly informed of when it is a “Spare the Air” day. While i’m fairly healthy and a such a day isn’t an emergency for me, with a one in ten incident rate of asthma in California Children, it’s an emergency for thousands and one i can act to reduce.
I’ve been using Art Botterell’s EDIS by email service — http://www.incident.com/edismail.shtml — since moving to California in 2000 without much review of his web site. I had hoped to suggest that tapping into that distribution system would provide BAAQMD with a way to more promptly reach residents, but there appears to be some uncertainty with the service. I note that there is documentation for a “Common Alerting Protocol” — http://www.incident.com/cookbook/ — in development.
Also, a simple RSS feed could make it easy for other web sites to include the air quality status and any “Spare the Air” alerts; individuals would be able to pull it into their news feeds.
