Weather

On the weather and other natural phenomenon.

South Lake Tahoe Caldor Fire Timelapse

Friday, September 3, 2021 

Sentinalhub Playground is an excellent resource for near real time, albeit not quite google earth 1m resolution, satellite images.  One of the cool features is being able to adjust the mapping of the satellite bands to RGB outputs.  For example, using Sentinel-2 L2A image data of South Lake Tahoe between 2021-08-17 and 2021-09-01 and remapping the 2190nm (SWIR2) to red, which tends to highlight fires though isn’t thermal, 783nm to green, a vegetation band (though it is NIR to humans) to make vegetation cover more obvious, and 443nm to blue instead of 490nm as shorter wavelengths tend to be scattered more by aerosols and smoke the fire line (bright red) and smoke (obvs) is very visible while vegetation is (false) green. Burnt earth shows as dark red, compared to bare ground, which tends to show tan in this mapping, thus revealing the current line of fire, the recently burned areas, and the wind direction carrying smoke, which tends to correlate with the advancing line, and fuel (vegetation) still standing.

Sentinel-2 L2A image on 2021-09-01 if South Lake Tahoe Caldor Fire

 

Then using the history controller to generate and save a sequence of stills, we can animate the progress of the fire with a simple FFMPEG command:

ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg' -vf crop=1754:1146 -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p fire.mp4

and you get:

 

Posted at 08:17:00 GMT-0700

Category: EventsGeopostMapTechnologyvideoWeather

Summer Blooms

Friday, July 24, 2015 

Roses Bird of Paradise Closeup Bird of Paradise Blooms Cactus Blooms

Posted at 13:41:13 GMT-0700

Category: photoWeather

Basra Snow Storm

Sunday, February 8, 2015 

I was feeling a little left out, reading posts by people digging out of snow storms and here I am in Basra where it gets down to 10C at night sometimes and usually hits the mid 20’s during the day.  Rough.  But the weather here came through with our own sort of snow storm.

 

Blizzard Brown-out conditions

Starting to look like a brown-out!

 

 

Snow covered yard furniture!

 

Obligatory shot of the yard furniture getting covered.

 

I've got snow on my head!

 

Kitty’s head is starting to show some accumulation.

 

Can't see more than a few hundred meters with this snow!

 

With all this blowing through you can barely see a few hundred meters!

 

starting to accumulate!

 

It’s really starting to accumulate. Where’s the snow blower?

 

Takes special cleaning to get that snow off.

 

It takes some special cleaning after playing out in it.

Posted at 06:20:38 GMT-0700

Category: CatsphotoPlacesTravelWeather

The Southern Iraqi Desert

Monday, February 4, 2013 

The desert just north of Basra is beautifully empty.

The Southern Iraqi Desert
(repost as only the old version of postie does the right thing with resizing images and creating proper thumbnails)
Click to enlarge.
Posted at 11:41:52 GMT-0700

Category: PlacesTravelWeather

Fall weather is arriving…

Sunday, September 23, 2012 

It only got to a peak 47.5C today according to our new roof-mounted weather station.  It seems to be about 3 degrees cooler away from ground level, but we’re still down about 4-5 degrees from peak temperatures.

Posted at 18:18:19 GMT-0700

Category: PlacesWeather

Lightning Strikes in Basra

Friday, May 11, 2012 

Cool storm last night.

Lightning_1.jpg

Lightning_2.jpg
Posted at 10:48:22 GMT-0700

Category: GeopostphotoWeather

54°C

Friday, May 11, 2012 

New experience today – 129+°F Wikipedia says the highest temperature recorded in Basra was 52°C. Now the car was driving over a sunlit road, so it was recording a higher temperature than you would see over shaded ground, but it is only May.

Our vehicle shows 54°C on a may day in Basra, Iraq.

Summer is going to be fun.

Posted at 09:42:05 GMT-0700

Category: GeopostphotoTravelWeather

Central Park in the Snow

Friday, January 7, 2011 

IMG00144-20110107-1348.jpg

Snow falling on Central Park from the 24th floor.

Posted at 11:52:10 GMT-0700

Category: photoPlacesWeather

Snowmaggeddon

Monday, December 27, 2010 

a snowy arrival in BOS

IMG00126-20101227-1614.jpg

But not exactly snowmaggeddon. By the time we got there it was easy to get around.

Posted at 14:16:39 GMT-0700

Category: photoPlacesTravelWeather

Rain, in LA? In May?

Tuesday, May 18, 2010 

What next? Cats and dogs sleeping toghether?

Posted at 20:38:20 GMT-0700

Category: Weather