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Kitchen Table Kibitzing is a community series for those who wish to share part of the evening around a virtual kitchen table with kossacks who are caring and supportive of one another. So bring your stories, jokes, photos, funny pics, music, and interesting videos, as well as links—including quotations—to diaries, news stories, and books that you think this community would appreciate. Readers may notice that most who post diaries and comments in this series already know one another to some degree, but newcomers should not feel excluded. We welcome guests at our kitchen table, and hope to make some new friends as well.
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The other night the topic of weather came up, specifically, California’s lack of rain. We all agreed California was nowhere near climbing out of its years long drought anytime soon, but lets be real, none of us are meteorologists. Luckily for us, Tom Di Liberto is a meteorologist and he happens to have some thoughts on the subject. Surely his opinion is based on science, numbers, and stuff like that, if you believe in that stuff.
The young scientist was impressed by our December deluges, but declared that it barely dented the drought entering its fourth year. As proof, he proceeds to point to his paint-by-numbers maps showing something…
I do like the colors, very earthy.
After the storms, the area of California that was considered
exceptional fell from 55% to 32%. Exceptional. And if you look closely, you can see the southeast tip is now just
abnormally dry, but nobody ever said Californians were normal, so I guess that is good.
But the real question is, how much rain do we need to get out of this mess? According to Mr. Di Liberto, a lot, a whole heck of a lot. For the last three years combined, we are between 30-50 inches below normal. If we were to get rain doubled what would be considered average, we could bring ourselves up to 20% of the average four-year cycle. One problem with that, we are already below average for the year with no rain predicted soon.
Also this summer's predicted lawn colors.