h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

They're forecasting a maximum temperature of 79F/26.1C for Friday The average temperature for the day is 62/16.7, so that's 17F above normal The record for the date is 83. Gonna be 77 today too. You can't really complain about weather like that in January, just as long as it doesn't portend another summer like last year's. Maybe it's just temperature lag from last summer. Yeah, that's it

It is, isn't it?

Looks to be another dry year: http://www.nasa.gov/topics/earth/features/lanina20120118.html

That's not good news. And we topped out at 80 today.

Friday's forecast maximum revised to 82.

They got that wrong by a long way - yesterday's maximum was 74.

Here are a couple of good links to climate data. This is the evidence. People can make up their own opinions, but they don't get to make up the evidence.

http://climate.nasa.gov/evidence/

And here's a concise article on Forbes that might appeal to some.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/petergleick/2012/01/21/2011-climate-change-in-pictures-and-data-just-the-facts/

I reckon you and I both know that they'll try (and deny), and that there are people out there either stupid enough, ignorant enough or just plain bigoted enough to believe them

The overture to our "significant rain event" has just started with some distant rumbles of thunder and the first of several predicted downpours. Perfect timing too. I just had enough time this morning to get to the supermarket for my weekly food shopping spree before heading back home on the bus. If the forecast is to be believed it's going to rain almost continuously for the next 30 hours or so, which coincides almost exactly with my weekend. I have no complaints about that - I'm happy to stay indoors for the next two days cooking and baking and drinking and watching films

Well, it's turning out to be something of a non-rain event so far. After this morning's precipitation, nothing has fallen from the sky. Although, we're currently at the northern end of a tornado watch box. Which ends at 12.05am. Which is a very curious time to end the watch.

They're calling for widespread street flooding in Houston again today. Of course, they were calling for the rain to begin late afternoon yesterday and other than a few scatter sprinkles we haven't seen it.

I suspect that it will be quite nasty around lunchtime though.

Yep, there's a squall line heading your way that's just passed through Austin maybe an hour ago. Looks like you'll get the tail end of it but there's some very heavy rain there http://austin.ynn.com/content/weather/satelliteradar/#doppler_texas-animate

We've had a total of 3.02" since about 2.30am, 1.16" between 3.00 and 4.00. I got woken up several times by lightning strikes that must have been very close. Austin Airport is reporting 5.65" in the last 24 hours, and I reckon most of that fell overnight, since 2am.

I haven't been outside yet to see if there's any damage around the complex, and it's still pretty dark anyway, but the local NPR station is saying there are some power cuts, flight delays at the airport, structural damage, some road flooding, and school delays.

Just been to the laundry room. There's a lot of small debris on the floor, and also the screens from the front windows of two apartments on the ground floor in my building There's also some flooding. This complex is on an incline which slopes down to where the dumpsters (and my building) are, and there's a storm drain there. It looks the grate must be blocked because the water's not draining, even though there's water running through the culvert higher up the slope. I didn't see any trees down though.

I wish these storms would come through in the daytime instead of at night. There's been a pretty good record of that recently. Apart from keeping me awake with the thunder or the pounding rain, I like to watch torrential rain.

We have a confirmed tornado touchdown during yesterday's storms http://www.srh.noaa.gov/news/display_cmsstory.php?wfo=ewx&storyid=78142&source=0

There were two in the Houston area. One tore a roof off one building and dropped it on a restaurant next door. Houston had some street flooding. Casa de Grim got only 0.6 inches of rain.

Ha! I knew it!
http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=24&month=1&year=2012&obj=sun&afl=-11&day=1

From January 1st to January 22nd the sunrise wobbles around between 7.27am and 7.29am, and even by the end of the month only makes it to 7.23am, but the day lengthens from 10h 13m 59s to 10h 43m 58s over the course of the month as the sunset gets later and later.

Here's a couple fairly random pages I found Googling the following terms:
Analemma - http://www.zullophoto.com/sub_analemmaphoto.html

And Sun tracks ( shot with pinhole camera) - http://chronographics.blogspot.com/2010/05/indexical-chronographic.html

Share and enjoy.

Nice

It's stuff like that which helps to keep a sense of proportion amidst all the madness and stupidity

Ya know...

That's exactly what I was looking for...

Huge

My dad's peach tree is blooming and the robins are already here.

We'll get a cold snap in February that'll soon take care of that