Oddball weather week here in Goleta, right next door to Santa Barbara.
We had a weather event, as they call it, on Tuesday. More specifically a rain event. I don’t know why everything has become an “event.” One expects to hear trumpets or something announcing the coming “weather event.”
So the event occurred as predicted. Rain Tuesday night, slacking off in the morning, and coming back much more heavily in the afternoon and early evening. But the strange thing about the event was that the high for the day was 63 degrees and so was the low. In other words, it was 63 all day long.
I don’t remember when that last happened. I think having the same temperature all day long qualifies perhaps as an event, but a pretty uneventful one. Really.
Oh the rain event was attended also by a wind event. Though the wind event was not as intense as predicted.
There was also the possibility of landslide events because of previous fire events that had burned the vegetation off the hills. But that didn’t happened.
And then today out of nowhere we have a heat event. They were predicting 77 degrees for today but instead we hit 93. I don’t know if this heat event is connected or not with the weather event previously described.
For no known reason I began to think about phytoplankton and their role in cloud event formation. Apparently these tiny creatures emit a a chemical of some kind that goes up in the air and sort of serves as seeds for clouds. This particular contribution of the microbial kingdom to the functioning of the weather cycle was not and still is not completely understood.
Why I should think of this and where I learned it, I am not sure, though I think I heard it in lectures I used to attended in biology when I was teaching the research paper to biology students. I learned many things then most of which I have forgotten. I learned about diatoms for example. I am pretty sure they also play a significant role in the weather cycle.
I remain 98% water.
