Monday, January 25, 2010

Report From the Field: Wettest Year in Memory

Saturday I flew over Southeastern California from the Colorado River to the Los Angeles basin. Sorry, but I did not have my camera with me, so you will just have to take my word for it until someone else posts a picture or two.

The first indication I had of what I was about to see came when the pilot announced that "a very unusual site was coming up outside our windows.  The desert mountains are covered with snow."

What I saw first, because they were the furthest south, were the ~6000 foot snow capped peaks to the NW of the Salton Sea. The snow level was about half way up. (Later I would see even the ~2000 foot cliff top above Lake Elsinore (East of San Juan Capistrano) also covered. Outside the airliner's North windows the San Gabriel and Angeles and Santa Susana ranges were smothered with snow, but that isn't unusual after a winter storm except for how very low was the snow line of about 1500 feet.)

Then I saw some closer mountains with white peaks. This was still East of Indio. And then I noticed that there was a high plain that was completely white, surrounded on three sides by ridges maybe a thousand feet higher. To the south of this high plains desert was a gradual slope down maybe another 1000 feet to another plain that lacked the snow cover.

And that was when I noticed the biggest change. Every time I had flown over this stretch it had the appearance of a dusty yellow/tan. This time is was widely brown. The ground was that soaked. This is the California desert. And it was WET. Wetter than I've ever seen it in 40 years of flying over it. Everywhere that it is normally dull pastel it was now rich brown. Wet, wet, wet!

I hope you people in the Mid-West and back East are ready for what we got out here. Oh, and we have more storms scheduled for the coming week.



And I hope you all are happy that Al Gore is keeping warm and out of sight and paying himself carbon-credits so's he can keep his Tennessee mansions warm so that his pipes don't freeze while he's out flying jets around the world pushing his warmist agenda.

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