Monday, December 1, 2014

Flying over the storm coming to West Coast

I found this to be one of the most remarkable storms I have ever flown through and over. The first thing remarkable was that it was solid clouds (98%) over all of Oregon. Then it was about half clouds all the way down past San Jose where I landed just south of San Francisco. Then there were ice crystal clouds that at times went up to 40,000 feet where at 31,000 feet we were often flying through ice crystal clouds and looked up at ice crystal clouds up to about 41,000 feet.  But, it was always bumpy through those ice crystal clouds. Then there were Clouds also 50 to 100 miles out to sea as far as I could see in many places.

Pacific Ocean from  weather maps from:
https://weather.yahoo.com/maps/    This was the Pacific Ocean button at this page.


Then at the San Jose Airport lobby I saw someone looking at the world weather map and it looked like 300 to 500 miles of clouds stretching out into the Pacific Ocean. This made me think about Atmospheric Rivers like they talk about that likely happened during the Great Noachian Floods of the West Coast from Washington down to California and over as far as Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona and Nevada and I think Idaho too.

I'm not saying that this WILL happen this year or anything like that. However, it does at this point look a little similar to what was described below that happened in 1862 in California where the State went bankrupt when 1/4 of all homes and farms and lifestock were washed away into the ocean and the Sacramento River was 20 miles wide and the Sacramento River steamer Gem picked men off of Barns and out of trees along the way. And the capitol had to be moved to San Francisco for a couple of years I believe as well. The Governor traveled from Sacramento all the way to San Francisco in a boat.

The scientists say it began with Atmospheric Rivers of Storms evaporating off the Pacific (likely during an El Nino type of event). Though this year it is supposed to be a mild El Nino. So, anyway we will see what the warmer Pacific Ocean delivers to the West Coast this year.

However, what is really strange here is when I got off the plane it was 70 Degrees Fahrenheit and 68 degrees at the beach which is very unusual for this time of year because Thanksgiving is traditionally the coldest time of the year here and sometimes it is pretty cold around Halloween too. Not this year.

So, it reminds me much more of Hawaii in January than it does Northern California in November at all.

Nov 20, 2014
The event would be similar to intense California storms which occurred in 1861 and 1862. The name "ARkStorm" means "Atmospheric River (AR) 1000 (k)." The name was created as a way of quantifying the magnitude of west ...
Feb 26, 2014
The problem is the 1862 was the first time enough people lived in California after it became a state to record this happening for posterity. But, scientists have discovered this sort of thing happens at least once every 150 to 300 ...
Jan 23, 2011
The Great Flood of 1862 or Noachian Deluge was the largest flood in California's recorded history, occurring from December 1861 to January 1862. It was preceded by weeks of continuous rains (or snows in the high ...

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