An Atmospheric River

It started raining last evening, rained steadily all night, and the windscreen wipers were going at full clip while a weather person on the radio was discoursing on the definition of an 'Atmospheric River' as I was driving to class today. It seemed like a normal rainstorm to me, or perhaps what they used to call a 'Pineapple Express'...a narrow river-like stream of air carrying large amounts of  tropical moisture from Hawaii rather than a cold, more typical rainstorm from Alaska.

Weather researchers and forecasters are now releasing a new scale for predicting the strength of atmospheric rivers based on two factors...the intensity and the duration of the water vapor 'river' on a scale of one to five...much like the category scale for hurricanes in other parts of the country. It gets even more complicated than that, since the scale is assessed and predicted for every point in the path of the atmospheric river. 

I stopped listening and started paying more attention to the road when they said that we are currently experiencing a Cat 3-4AR. All this information will be used to predict floods, especially in flood prone areas like the Russian River and the Laguna de Santa Rosa and some of the hillier areas denuded of vegetation by fires and prone to mudslides. 

Once I finished my errands, got my hair cut and came home, I was disinclined to set foot outside the door again, so I took a picture of our hill garden from inside the house. If there is a way to photograph rain, I wasn't able to figure it out, but it can be seen in the form of drops coming off the eaves at the top of the picture. It isn't pouring off the roof anymore because OilMan cleared the gutters of acorns put there by the woodpeckers....