Grab your bear can or camp chair, kick your feet up and chew the fat about anything Sierra Nevada related that doesn't quite fit in any of the other forums. Within reason, (and the HST rules and guidelines) this is also an anything goes forum. Tell stories, discuss wilderness issues, music, or whatever else the High Sierra stirs up in your mind.
Stumbled into an interesting feature of caltopo with value, I'll pass on. This is about a current technology pro weather rainfall modeling output. While not accurately depicting rain that fell, by using radars, satellites and other technology, they are making impressive gains in estimating where it falls and vaguely how much. Someone for the above had to program how winds at different atmospheric elevations running into terrain would behave depositing storm precipitation.
Let's say one is in Base Layers, Scanned Topos mode at a granularity similar to paper topo maps. By mouse selectingForecasts 48hr Precip, one will see a bluish overlay mid opacity with zone precipitation numbers. But if one zooms out beyond a certain level, the numbers are not shown. As one zooms in, the zone granularity increases meaning a smaller area for which the number applies. These map screen capture images below are downsized 50%. Within one's browser zoom range where numbers show, there will be a maximum level of zoom that produces the smallest area the precipitation value represents. Expect this type of modeling also is used to create various rainfall maps where they need to fill in locations beyond actual weather stations with data.
In particular, have been planning a 5 day 4 night Volcanic Knob backpack that every lifeform in those droughty eco zones would much welcome the 0.38 to 0.48 inches of magical H2O. Especially Mr and Mrs Froggies.
Larger high cloud observed over the Evolution region:
rf-Evolution-8122.jpg (124.42 KiB) Viewed 61 times
And largest over the Great Western Divide since the Mexican monsoonal flow comes up front the south across the Sonora and Mojave Deserts.
rf-GreatWesternD-8122.jpg (149.66 KiB) Viewed 61 times
