Saturday, December 31, 2016

Ending The Year With A Rainy Day

... and showing the California drought in two charts.

It's been a good start to the 2016-2017 rain year here in California. The heavy rain areas in the north are all over 150% of normal and here in SoCal, the most recent set of storms has put us in the 120-140% range. Still, we're in a drought, make no mistake.

I discovered that the California rain data I had used in the past to make charts has easy-to-access historical data, so I rewrote my code and harvested data from 2011-present for two cities, San Diego and Santa Rosa. I picked San Diego because I live here (yay!) and Santa Rosa because it's a heavy-rain location, averaging about 36" per year. As a reference, San Diego gets about 10" per year.

The two charts below tell the story, but you'll have to click on them to see. I'm still working out how to display charts. In this case, my code created a csv file which I imported into Excel where I made these dreadful charts. I want to watch the Alabama game, so I'm not going to work on improving them, you'll just have to make do. Sorry about that.

2013 was very dry and the years 2011, 2012 and 2014 were below average. 2015 was reasonable and it looks like 2016 will be above average, assuming the rain continues to be good.




Meanwhile, here in the Catican Compound, 2016 was not a very dry year and tonight will probably be no exception. I plan to buy a very nice double IPA to celebrate the New Year.

God bless you all, thanks for stopping by and here's to a great 2017!

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