{"id":11921,"date":"2009-03-03T11:27:03","date_gmt":"2009-03-03T19:27:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kith.org\/journals\/jed\/2009\/03\/03\/11921.html"},"modified":"2009-03-03T11:27:03","modified_gmt":"2009-03-03T19:27:03","slug":"rain-tracking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/2009\/03\/03\/rain-tracking\/","title":{"rendered":"Rain tracking"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p>It's raining again here. Normally I would be unhappy about this (I still disapprove of stuff falling from the sky), but the dire news warnings about California's drought have finally penetrated my anti-rain bias, so I'm at least a little happy about it.<\/p>\n<p>(For those who haven't seen the dire news warnings, the short version is that we're in year three of a drought, rainfall continues to be below average, we have way more people than we did last time there was a drought, and a lot more farmland (than last time) is devoted to crops that can't be fallowed. I just saw an article that said something like 40,000 farm-related workers might be out of work this year as a result. The governor has asked us all to cut back on our water use by 20%.)<\/p>\n<p>Anyway, so I'm paying more attention to rain-related news now than I was a few weeks ago. So every time it rains, I want to find out how much it's raining, and to what degree it helps, and whether it's above or below the normal rainfall for this time of year.<\/p>\n<p>And I found that info frustratingly difficult to locate. There are pages that show average-monthly-rainfall charts for California (though I just saw two of those with wildly different numbers), but I couldn't find a page that juxtaposes that info with monthly-rainfall-so-far-this-year numbers.<\/p>\n<p>Eventually, I found the <a href=\"http:\/\/meteora.ucsd.edu\/cap\/western_drought.html\">California Drought Update 2009<\/a> page at the UCSD California Climate Change Center's website; that shows much of the kind of thing I'm looking for (though not in the exact form I wanted), but it was last updated on January 30. Still, it does use the word \"SNOTEL,\" and it does have pretty-but-scary colored maps showing how much of CA has been below 50% of normal precipitation over the past two years, so it's worth taking a look at.<\/p>\n<p>Finally, I followed some links from that page and got pretty much the info I was looking for. But since it was hard to find, I figured I'd post a blog entry pointing to it, in hopes that it would help both interested persons and search engines find the stuff.<\/p>\n<p>The main key I was missing is that there's a large amount of data at the <a href=\"http:\/\/www.water.ca.gov\/\">CA Department of Water Resources<\/a> website.<\/p>\n<p>Here are some specific relevant links, both at that site and elsewhere:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.water.ca.gov\/drought\/\">Drought Conditions<\/a> page, including a list of suggestions on <a href=\"http:\/\/www.water.ca.gov\/drought\/assist\/save20-indoors.cfm\">ways to reduce water use<\/a>.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/cdec.water.ca.gov\/cgi-progs\/reports\/DROUGHTSUM\">Daily Drought Information Summary<\/a> has tables showing most of the info I was looking for, more or less.<\/li>\n<li>The related <a href=\"http:\/\/cdec.water.ca.gov\/cgi-progs\/reports\/EXECSUM\">Executive Update<\/a> page shows a higher-level at-a-glance view, though it's about a week old right now. A week ago, the northern Sierra region was at 83% of average precipitation for the \"rainfall year\" that started in October, 2008.<\/li>\n<li>There's a nice daily-updated <a href=\"http:\/\/cdec.water.ca.gov\/cgi-progs\/reports\/PLOT_ESI\">graph of Northern Sierra precipitation<\/a>, showing not only the current and average, but several specific particularly wet and particularly dry years.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/cdec.water.ca.gov\/water_cond.html\">California Statewide Water Conditions<\/a> has links to a bunch of useful info and reports.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/drought.unl.edu\/dm\/monitor.html\">US Drought Monitor<\/a> (not at CA DWR site) has a useful nationwide map, plus links to animations and such.<\/li>\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.wrcc.dri.edu\/\">Western Regional Climate Center<\/a> (also not at CA DWR site) looks like it has useful\/relevant info, but I haven't looked at it in detail.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>It&#8217;s raining again here. Normally I would be unhappy about this (I still disapprove of stuff falling from the sky),&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11921","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11921","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11921"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11921\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11921"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11921"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11921"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}