100% Chance of Rain

Don't you love it? "100% CHANCE"?? I mean, 100% is a done deal isn't it? THERE WILL BE RAIN. This is now on my favorite oxymoron list, right up there with political decency, civil war, and all that.

But speaking of weather, there is a great weather website that has no ads, it's the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration and the adress is www.wrh.noaa.gov. You can put in any location but you can also bookmark our area so that when you want a week's forecast, you get it right away. There is probably a way to put this on your desktop too, but I haven't got that far yet.

There are a great many features in this site, such as forecast discussion which is the meteorologist's narrative of what is coming our way. The text has special terms in boldface which means you can click on them and get a definition. "Trough" for example means an elongated low pressure area not associated with a circulating low pressure system which typically brings a "front", another definition.

We find this site particularly helpful with winter coming on because we can enter a destination or waypoint and see what we're getting into. Then we cross-check www.dot.ca.gov/dist2 which is Siskiyou County to get the Cal Trans road conditions.

This site gives not only chain requirements but you can also view the roadway from their remote cameras which is very helpful if you are headed to Medford and going over the Siskiyous because there is a camera at Hilt and one at the summit.

Of course all of us in Lake Shastina also benefit from "The Wall". This is an orographic (look that one up) 'curtain' which forms at the upper end of the Sacramento River canyon roughly between Mt. Shasta and Weed. I checked the precip records once and this is how I recall them: Dunsmuir had 54+ inches, Mt. Shasta 36", Weed 26, and Shastina 16. The moisture fell to the ground as it rose up the canyon.

As residents of the Shasta Valley know, one can clearly see a weather wall to our south when a storm is in progress . . . it may be raining or snowing like crazy in Weed and points south while we might experience wind and partly cloudy skies.

This is one of the biggest reasons we moved here. After 33+ years in Mt. Shasta we got REAL tired of drifted snow so deep we could not even get to work some days. We found the almost-snowless conditions of Lake Shastina particularly appealing after shoveling our roof in 2001 for the third consecutive year.

So yes, we had a 50-year snow storm a couple years ago of a foot or so but I'll take the wind any day.