Unfamiliar Weather 2015

[PunaMauka2]

Appreciate the link, Tom.

A very reasonable question. That tall Sugi has long been a prime aesthetic focal point of the front yard. There's no way it could have been missed over the years extending all the way down to the ground, short of having been completely embedded in the bark of the tree at the base, and I don't see any indication of that. In the past I had casually noticed the section of cable high up, but thought it must be an unusually long and straight rootish growth of some sort (Sugi get pretty gnarled). Only today I noticed what was clearly the frayed end poking down among some gnarled branches. But then I was never on the lookout for something like that up there until today. I may get the ladder out to get a closer look at the end, but it looked like the type of round cable to connect television to roof antenna. I sure wouldn't have wanted such a cable running all the way into the house on Friday.

[knieft]

What a find! Makes me want to string some big trees (well away from our house in the 260 acre lot next to us) with cables and see if they would get struck.

Well, I guess I'm not that bored, but I wonder....

Cheers,
Kirt

[beejee]

2015 continues to be a very peculiar year weather-wise. It's now November, feels like September without wind. I hope at some point we get back to "normal".

[dmbwest]

Anyone in town feel those puffs today ?

Several folks down the road had damage to roofs and buildings .... Like a mini tornado.

aloha,
pog

[dmbwest]

http://www.bigislandvideonews.com/2015/1...hilo-home/

[beejee]

Wow pog, that's crazy. Must have been quite the mini tornado. Certainly sucks to lose your roof in any case, but I suppose better to lose it in a mini tornado than in a full scale hurricane. I hope no one was hurt.

[tada]

NASA observes "declining phase of the sun". Which means cooler weather??

http://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-25743806

[PunaMauka2]

I dunno if it's exactly unfamiliar, but the rain up mauku has been on the unusual side of heavy and persistent over the past week or so. Drenched.

[TomK]

tada,

"NASA observes "declining phase of the sun". Which means cooler weather??"

Possibly, but the true answer is no-one really knows. The cycle is a long one and year-to-year temperatures are much more likely due to short-term effects caused by our own atmosphere. The problem is that the technology used to study the sun these days has not been around for very long, so there's no real way to compare what's happening now to, e.g., what happened before the last Maunder Minimum. Sunspot counts are a way of looking into the past, and looking for correlations via ice-core data will help, but back then we had no way of measuring the sun's activity via x-rays, UV, or obviously, space probes, so the comparison lacks a lot of data.

[tada]

So "Maunder Minimum" means I'll be skiing Mauna Kea!!