The Dry Garden: After the storm
After the storm, we have no coroners, no priests for big trees. There will no autopsies, no last rites for the shredded jacaranda and more than 50 damaged trees at the Los Angeles County Arboretum & Botanic Garden in Arcadia, the fallen oaks of Fair Oaks Avenue or mangled magnolia trees of Orange Grove Boulevard in Pasadena. Ceremony, if it can be called that, will involve gas-fired buzz saws and insurance adjusters.
So how do we mark what happened? For that matter, what did happen? And what, ultimately, will we make of the night the trees fell?
Click here to keep reading in the Los Angeles Times about the massive tree losses across the Los Angeles foothills during record winds last Wednesday night.
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And May brings… rain
Late spring rain forecast for Los Angeles, CA for May 17-18, 2011Wet weekend
If you thought that Southern California’s much anticipated snow was the damp squib of the weekend, you didn’t watch the Oscars. More interesting are 2010-11 precipitation numbers to date for what has been a reasonably wet rainy season in Los Angeles County in spite of a La Niña in the equatorial Pacific.
Foothills: Altadena 26.89″ ***, Pasadena: 15.58″ *
San Fernando Valley: Burbank: 14.09″ **
Basin: Downtown Los Angeles: 15.78″ **
Coast: Long Beach: 15.38″ **
If luck amounts to a water plan, then we planned well. To see how a now weakening La Niña has impacted the southern US, from Arizona clear across to Florida, click here for the US Drought Monitor.
*Source: National Weather Service, Los Angeles/Oxnard
**Source: National Weather Service, California Nevada River Forecast Center
***Source: Bill Westphal
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Rain and snow in LA and Vegas
As fun as it is when it rains on celebrities at the Oscars, this year it looks like we will merely see the pencil-thin starlets shiver. The above icons in descending order represent the current National Weather Service forecasts for greater Los Angeles foothills, basin and coast respectively. Click here or on the top row of icons to be taken to the National Weather Service website. From Ken Clark’s AccuWeather blog forecast for Los Angeles: “A little rain could break out as early as Friday afternoon, especially from the Los Angeles Basin on north. But the most rain occurs Friday night, then becomes showery Saturday into early Saturday night with a couple of thunderstorms possible as well. Snow levels initially will be around 3,000 to 3,500 feet Friday night, locally lower interior mountains. Snow levels fall late Friday night and Saturday bottoming out at between 1,000 and 1,500 feet, but …
The weatherman’s sure
December 18, 2010 National Weather Service icons for Altadena sum up forecasts for heavy rains across Greater Los Angeles and Southern California this weekend. Click on the image to be taken to the National Weather Service and latest flood advisories.
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