Thunderstorms in the mountains are another animal. I’ve never lived in a place before where they’re so loud, or so likely to interfere with your day. Over the weekend, we got hit by the offspring of a hurricane — we’re far too sheltered to get the actual hurricane itself, but its loud little children were kicking up a fuss. Plenty of water, which is always welcome, but plenty of thunder too, which knocked out our power for a while.
The weather brings with it an interesting variety of things. We get dryness, then drought, then forest-fires. Rain and flash floods. Snow and ice, then visitors who don’t know how to drive in the snow and the ice and end up causing accidents that block all the traffic. But of late, it’s been the dryness, drought and fires we’ve been dealing with — which makes the forecast for the upcoming year quite hopeful.
El Niño is a repeating weather event, and recent models have suggested that they’re becoming more frequent, and more extreme than once they were. And now, it’s looking likely that the event may bring a little relief from the dry weather to California. I have no idea if any of what we’ve been experiencing is linked to this — I don’t know enough about weather patterns and suchlike to know if the hurricane splinters are in any way linked to this. But regardless of the source, every drop of rain is more than welcome here.
Well, Californian weather over the past week or so has hit the news over here in the past few days – mainly about the floods in coastal areas – San Diego, and the like, but also showing the spin-off stuff running inland towards where you guys are. Seems to have settled down a bit now, but looks like you’ve had fun!
It’s been a strange but welcome summer all told — thunderstorms and rain around here — but once you drive down the mountain a distance, it’s hard to tell if there’s been much of it elsewhere. The high desert is still pretty baked — but being a desert, it’s tough to know if that’s indicating anything at all.