The first picture at right is a snapshot of our local NEXRAD weather radar. The lower right circle is a close-up of the area around our home, and you can see that it's raining. As of this post, we've accumulated 4 mm--that may not sound like much, but it's a whole bunch of rain for mid-October, and very, very welcome as we enter the high-risk part of our fire season.
Recall that the Cedar Fire occured at the end of October in 2003, and you can see why we worry about such things...
The middle picture shows the barometric pressure here for the past week; it's notable mostly for the precipitous drop that's recorded for the past (about) 30 hours. This is the classic sign of an impending storm. The rightmost picture is temperature (red line) and humidity (green line) over the past week. You can see that the storm's onset included a dramatic drop in temperatures and an equally dramatic rise in relative humidity. In particular you can see the sharp rise to nearly 100% humidity at the onset of the rain just a couple of hours ago.
The NOAA forecast has good chances of rain from now through Tuesday evening, and we are making offerings to whatever rain gods we can identify, in the hopes of helping the weather forecasters improve their accuracy...
