The Daily Parker

A collection of weather phenomena off the west coast of North America, including a bomb cyclone, will give northern California record rainfall over the next day and a half:

Amid an exceptional drought that has wrought havoc on California for years, a Level 5 out of 5 atmospheric river is soaking the region, dumping double-digit rainfall totals and up to six feet of mountain snow. This heavy precipitation will help ease the drought but produce dangerous mudslides and debris flows in areas recently devastated by fires.

Atmospheric rivers are long, narrow swaths of exceptionally moist air, sometimes sourced from the tropics, that can produce excessive amounts of precipitation.

“It will be a wild 24 to 36 hours across northern California as we will see an extreme and possible historic atmospheric river push through the region,” wrote the National Weather Service in Sacramento, calling it a “dangerous, high-impact weather system.”

Flash flood watches are up for most of Central and Northern California, blanketing some of the same areas that went upward of six months without a stitch of measurable rain. Sacramento recorded its first 0.01 inches of rain last week since March 19, capping off a record-setting 222 days without precipitation. Now it is bracing for more than half a foot of rain and flooding.

The storm offshore of the Pacific Northwest driving this atmospheric river into the coastline rapidly intensified at a staggering rate. Meteorologists refer to a storm as a “bomb” if its minimum central air pressure drops by 24 millibars or more in 24 hours, signifying intense and speedy “deepening.” That sucks in more air and allows the storm to intensify.

This particular storm strengthened at twice that rate as a “double bomb” with its pressure tanking to 943 millibars, which, according to the Weather Service, would make it “the strongest known system for the area.”

Over the mainland United States, such low atmospheric pressure is practically unheard of. Even on the East Coast, where cyclones regularly strengthen into massive nor’easters, pressures seldom fall this low. The powerful March 1993 “superstorm,” among the most intense and damaging storms ever to strike the United States, bottomed out at “only” 960 millibars.

Welcome to climate change: seven months without rain, then nothing but rain for two days. Fun.

Here in Chicago we just have a normal gray rainy October afternoon. I'm glad we don't have to worry about 150 mm of rain in the next four hours.

Cassie and I both love these crystal-clear autumn days in Chicago, though as far as I know she spent her first two autumns in Tennessee. Does Nashville have crisp fall mornings? I don't know for sure, and Cassie won't say.

I meant to highlight these stories yesterday but got into the deep flow of refactoring:

• People who adopted dogs during the pandemic have discovered that dogs cost money. No kidding.
• Also, living alone costs more than living with a partner, even though singles have more social contacts and tend to be happier. Again, no kidding.
• It turns out that online "wellness" communities spread huge amounts of anti-vaccine bullshit.
• “This idea of intellectual debate and rigor as the pinnacle of intellectualism comes from a world in which white men dominated,” said the geosciences department chair at Williams College, causing me to react loudly enough to alarm Cassie.
• The worst airline in the history of the world died pathetically a week ago, and its successor airline managed to launch with truly ugly livery.

I will now make Cassie drool buckets by using salmon skin as a training tool.

Oh boy:

• Voters have defeated billionaire, populist Czech prime minister Andrej Babiš through the simple process of banding together to kick him out, proof that an electorate can hold the line against strongmen.
• A school administrator in Texas told teachers that "if they have a book about the Holocaust in their classroom, they should also offer students access to a book from an 'opposing' perspective." Because Texas.
• Oakland Police should stop shooting Black men having medical emergencies, one would think.
• The Federal Railroad Administration and Amtrak have released plans for new passenger train routes from Chicago to other Midwest cities.
• Meanwhile, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker (D) has proposed hundreds of millions of dollars in tax breaks and incentives to encourage electric-vehicle production in the state.
• New Republic's David Klion says Denis Villenueuve's upcoming Dune adaptation "is the adaptation Frank Herbert's novel deserves," and I can't wait until it comes out on the 22nd!
• As Chicago has stuck to June-like temperatures for the past two weeks, an active jet stream has given the Rocky Mountain upwards of 750 mm of snow and temperatures as low as -10°C.
• Researchers have demonstrated how to reverse-engineer fake photos generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs), a common type of AI.
• Archaeologists have gotten closer to figuring out who massacred a village off the coast of Sweden around 400 CE, and why.

Cassie has bugged me for the last hour, even though we went out two hours ago. I assume she wants dinner. I will take care of that presently.

About that new phone, I have to say, I am very impressed with T-Mobile's new 5G network:

Also note that temperature bug in the upper-left corner. Yes, it was 26°C yesterday afternoon in Chicago. For comparison, October 10th has a normal high temperature of 18.2°C. June 7th has a normal high of 26°C. I hope autumn actually starts sometime this month.

Chicago finished September with an average temperature of 21.27°C, making it the 5th-warmest on record, and almost tying September 1971's 21.33°C. Meanwhile, the NCDC predicts warmer-than-normal temperatures through the end of next week.

This shows one of the ways global warming will actually make Chicago a better place to live. If trends continue, we'll continue to have warmer and wetter winters than the historical norms, at the cost of warmer and drier summers. The downside, of course, is drought, and most of Northern Illinois desperately needs rain—especially this close to the harvest. (Just not too much rain, because, you know, harvest.)

For now, though, I love the sunny and comfortable (mid-20s during the day, high-10s overnight) weather this time of year.

Actually, I'm ecstatic that a cold front blew in off the lake yesterday afternoon, dropping the temperature from 30°C to 20°C in about two hours. We went from teh warmest September 27th in 34 years to...autumn. Finally, some decent sleepin' weather!

Meanwhile:

• The former head of the Chicago chapter of the Fraternal Order of Police, a vocal anti-vaxxer, has wound up in the ICU with Covid. (This is the current union leader, who has been suspended without pay for insubordination.)
• Murders in the entire US went up 30% in 2020, perhaps because people did not take well to all the crazy in the world.
• Paul Krugman has had it with the "Rip Van Winkle caucus:" "some Democrats seem to have formed their perceptions about both economics and politics during the Clinton years and haven’t updated their views since."
• Why does the Supreme Court have such bad press lately? Maybe because they have such bad communication skills.
• The Great Chicago Fire, 150 years ago next Friday, destroyed 17,450 buildings but spared these six.
• Sociologist Ellen Lamont points out that an equal (hetero) marriage requires equal dating first.
• It turns out that big, ugly McMansions don't sell in any economy.
• The CTA Red Line modernization project will employ a 90-meter crane when workers start building the mainline supports in a couple months.

And though the article could use an editor, Whisky Advocate has a short bit on Aaron Sorkin's love of whisky in his movies.

My apartment has 30 windows, and at the moment all 28 of the ones I can reach are open. But the temperature keeps ticking up. Right now my office is a comfortable 25°C with a gentle breeze passing through. The Nest sensor in my bedroom reads 23°C, also a lovely temperature for the end of September.

Tonight, however, I would like to sleep, and at 23°C I feel too warm to sleep well. I prefer it around, oh, 17-18°C. I can do all right at 21°C.

So: do I wait for the temperature to fall naturally after the sun goes down in a bit less than three hours? Or do I hit the A/C? The NWS says it'll be 21°C by 11pm and 17°C right before sunrise.

See? My ancestors didn't have to think about this when they wandered the savannahs of Africa 100,000 years ago. They just had to worry about lions.

I've opened nearly every window in my house to let in the 15°C breeze and really experience the first real fall morning in a while. Chicago will get above-normal temperatures for the next 10 days or so, but in the beginning of October that means highs in the mid-20s and lows in the mid-teens. Even Cassie likes the change.

Since I plan to spend nearly every moment of daylight outside for the rest of this weekend, I want to note a few things to read this evening when I come back inside:

• TFW your bogus election recount in Arizona finds your guy lost by 360 more votes than the official count reported in November. Sad!
• Speaking of the XPOTUS, he does not like the January 6th commission.
• Ed Kilgore advises the current POTUS on what to tell recalcitrant members of his own party.
• The New Yorker's Ben Crair reports on a German biologist who has elucidated how species become species.
• In an Atlantic article from May, writer and journalist Joshua Sharpe explains why "we should all be more afraid of driving."

Finally, if you really want to dig into some cool stuff in C# 10, Scott Hanselman explains implicit namespace support.

Today might be the last hot day of the year in Chicago. (I hope so, anyway.) While watching the cold front come through out my office window, with the much-needed rain ahead of it, I have lined up some news stories to read later today:

• My alderman got attacked on Saturday a couple blocks from my house by a well-known local vagrant.
• Josh Marshall believes US Senator Kyrsten Sinema (D-AZ) has no plans to run for re-election.
• In related news, CNN explains what happens to all the rats when a hurricane squishes through New York.
• Once again, Netflix and the other streaming services won most of last night's Emmys.

And finally, Metallica has an unexpected show tonight at Metro Chicago, about two kilometers from my house. Tickets are $20. I hope people show up for my board meeting tonight.

I completed a long-overdue project for my condo board today, made more tolerable by sitting in my relocated office with all the air and light it provides.

Having completed that project, I will shortly take Cassie for another hour-long walk.