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NOAA: For most of the country, August precipitation should be normal

The National Weather Service released a 30-day forecast yesterday. Water temperatures in the equatorial Pacific have returned to normal, so La Niña is officially ended. For most of North Carolina, the 30-day forecast for August is for normal temperatures and normal rainfall. Farther south, into South Carolina and Georgia, temperatures are expected to be above normal.

It’s nice to hear that La Niña is gone, but we need rain badly. The rivers are low. The water in my little stream has stopped flowing.

Wikipedia: a red-tailed hawk

It is never silent here. I am surrounded by a dense population of birds. One thing I’ve learned: It is wrong to think that birds always sing. Sometimes they do. But sometimes they yell. They quarrel. They scold. And clearly they communicate. The hawks have been extremely noisy for days down in the woods. I don’t know what kind of hawks they are, and I don’t know for sure why they have been so noisy. My assumption, though, is that they have fledglings on the ground or in the trees, and they’re looking out for and protecting the fledglings. I was able to get about 30 seconds of recording today when one of the hawks came to a nearby tree. Note that this is not just one hawk squawking. It is two more more hawks communicating. Or so I deduce because they take turns and don’t usually squawk at the same time. In this recording, at 28 seconds, the hawk starts to squawk, then its sound takes on a warbling sound. The warbling is because it took wing and flew back into the woods.

Click below to play the MP3 file:

Weather Underground

The Atlantic hurricane season is off and running. Tropical Storm Bertha is now forming in the South Atlantic. Jeff Masters at Weather Underground, whose excellent blog follows these storms and gives good descriptions of the meteorology behind them, says that Bertha has already set a record. It’s the farthest east a tropical storm has ever formed this early in the season. Masters thinks that this may mean that the 2008 hurricane season may be more active than average.

Here in Northwest North Carolina, up against the mountains, a strong hurricane season is good news rather than bad news. Hurricanes rarely do much damage this far inland, but they often bring excellent rains and interesting tropical weather.

A storm approaches from the west. Maybe with the right kind of lenses and filters it can be done, but there are some things that I find almost impossible to photograph. Skies, for one. Impressive trees. And views inside the woods. It would be interesting to discuss these problems with photographers with more experience and better cameras than I have. In the case of views inside the woods, I think the problem is that a flat photograph does not capture the three-dimensional effect. Woods have a depth that is very hard to capture in a flat photograph. In any case, here’s a sky photograph. It’s the approach of a storm. Summer storms here in northwest North Carolina always approach from the west, with a bit of northward drift. I wish I understood the meteorology of this better, but I think it has to do with the way airflows over the Southeast (in the summer) circulate around the “Bermuda High.” The Bermuda High, which dominates the weather here during the summer, is a high pressure system that moves around in the Atlantic between Bermuda and the American coast. When the Bermuda High in the right position for rain, humid air flows in a kind of circulation motion off the Gulf of Mexico into the Southeast, creating conditions for afternoon and evening thunderstorms. This particular storm didn’t bring much rain, but I didn’t complain too much because yesterday’s storm dropped almost two inches. In the Southeast, most of the summer rain comes from thunderstorms. Long, leisurely rains almost never happen in the summer. That pattern starts to change in the fall after hurricane season is over. Then we get real rain fronts that can sometimes last for days. Sometimes we get flooding from the summer rains, but the real reservoir-fillers happen during the fall, winter, and spring.

After this storm passed this evening, it left…

… this to the east, and …

… this to the west.

Weather Underground

So what if the Dow is down 360 points today and oil is at a new high? As I was just saying to a friend in email, when you’ve relocalized, and having a decent supper depends on it, nothing is more thrilling than a good downpour of unforecast, unexpected rain. I’m joking. But it’s still thrilling. And actually there are beautiful showers all across the South right now. This probably means that neither the Bermuda High nor La Niña is exerting an evil influence on us right now.

I don’t know a great deal about who reads this blog, but we do get readers, and traffic has grown each month. Much of the traffic seems to come from Google searches for both terms (“creecy greens”) and photos.

NOAA

You’ll recall that the drought in the southeastern United States since late last summer was caused, according to climate scientists, by La Niña. La Niña is a large patch of abnormally cold water in the equatorial Pacific which alters how rainfall moves up from the south toward the southeastern United States. NOAA says that these equatorial ocean currents are warming up, which means that La Niña is weakening. NOAA says, though, that La Niña will persist for another three months.

This latest update from NOAA on La Niña does not specifically mention the southeastern United States, but it does say that below average rainfall will continue in the southwest, from Texas to Nevada.

With luck, the good spring rains we’ve been having here in northwestern North Carolina will continue.

Once upon a time, cell phones were great telephones. Back in the mid-1990s, when I worked for the San Francisco Examiner, the Examiner had a fantastic collection of analog cell phones that are now considered obsolete. Money was no object to the Examiner — reporters and photographers in the field had to be able to communicate with the mother ship no matter what the cost. My favorite phones were the old analog bag phones. These phones put out a three-watt signal and supported audio quality that was as good as a regular telephone.

Then the digital revolution completely changed cell phones. Digital is supposed to make everything better, right? In the case of cell phones, that is most decidedly not true. The old analog phones have now been almost completely phased out, and most cellular companies won’t let you use them anymore. The digital phones did bring prices down, by allowing the cell phone companies to push more calls through the same towers and radio bandwidth, but the toll on voice quality was tremendous.

Why cell phone calls make us tired

This is because the sound of the human voice on cell phones is now digitally “compressed” to the thinnest possible data stream. This is a “lossy” compression. As much voice information is thrown away as the cell phone companies think they can get away with. Cell phone signals are way more compressed than what you get in, say, MP3 music compression. One of the reasons talking on a cell phone requires so much concentration (making cell phones even more distracting for drivers) is that, whether you realize it or not, your brain must work very hard during a cell phone call to try to fill in the missing information as best it can to parse the words. This is why many of us find cell phone calls very tiring. Another digital artifact that makes cell phone calls annoying is that there is delay. Your voice no longer travels at the speed of light as it did during analog days. Instead your voice travels at the speed of the cell phone companies’ equipment — computers, basically, and we know how fast computers sometimes are. That delay distorts conversational cues. It’s easy for both people to start talking at once, and it takes a fraction of a second to realize that you’re both talking at once. Thus cell phone calls are filled with little verbal dosados.

Motorola rules!

Motorola still makes a bag phone, and yes it’s digital. Only Motorola engineers (how I admire them!) could make such a nerdy telephone. It weighs 10 pounds. Cell phone companies don’t want devices firing three watts into their systems anymore, but you can add a three-watt amplifier to this phone if you need it. Otherwise its transmitter is rated at .6 watt, or 600 milliwatts.

Just how much power any digital cell phone puts out at any given time is a complicated matter. Not only that, but there are many good reasons for keeping the power down. It extends battery life, it reduces interference on congested cellular bands, and it reduces RF exposure from that tiny internal antenna that’s just inches from your eyes. But transmitter output power isn’t all that matters. Receiver sensitivity also is a big factor. Before a cell phone can be a good phone, it must first be a good radio transmitter and receiver. Those Motorola engineers excel at that. The antenna on the Motorola M800 bag phone has a sticker near the antenna warning you, in both English and French, to keep 20 centimeters (8 inches) away from the antenna. And, as every ham radio operator knows, the quality of the antenna is at least as important as the quality of the receiver and transmitter. Most cell phones have extremely sorry antennas. Using a coaxial cable, you can attach any kind of antenna you want to this phone, for example a directional Yagi antenna like the one I use for my EVDO Internet setup.

In any case, those people who’ve been annoyed that I’ve been hard to reach while I’ve been working on my communications systems out here in the sticks may be happy to know that I now have powerful cell phone with outstanding audio quality. But if you’d like to chat, please call on weekends, because, even though I splurged on a heavy-duty phone, I’m not spending a bundle on the Alltel service plan I signed up for.

This is in Bob and Sue’s yard (my brother and sister-in-law).

Red azaleas

White azaleas

Tulips

Spring in Yadkin County, where my Mama’s house is, is running about a week ahead of spring in Stokes County. Stokes has a slightly higher elevation and is closer to the mountains.

Lilacs

Dogwood

Top of frame: tulip poplar bulb not yet open. Lower frame: a dried blossom from last year

Young maple leaves and maple seed tassles

Bonnie, what is this? Response: euphorbia

Bonnie, what is this behind the violets? Response: day lilies