Day: July 19, 2015

New Wildfire?

2:00 pm – I’m trying to add a radar and a lightning strike maps, but they made load at the bottom. Yup. The bottom.

12:00 Update: Fire in Ventana Wilderness, 5 acres, difficult access, AA overhead. Major thunder here, light rain beginning. In Templeton to my south east,  a truck traveling near 46 West and 101 was struck by lightning, requiring an ambulance and a tow truck.

11:00 am – UPDATE:

07/19/2015 09:32 LPF-2121
POST Wildfire E. Side of Post Summit/So. Fork/Little Sur River . BC12LPF CRW4LPF DOZ3LPF E17LPF E18LPF E31LPF 4X4 E335LPF E37LPF HEL527LPF PAT18LPF Q12:00 WT5LPF Josh Langston Effective 10:10 . . 36.285 x 121.778

07/19/2015 09:32 LPF-2121image image
New Wildfire . . E18LPF PAT18LPF Q . . . 36.285 x 121.778

Not sure exactly where this is, but longitude puts it just south? of Big Sur Station, but east? I think? Maybe someone with faster internet can clarify.

Lightning

NWS reports 600 cloud to ground strikes between 6-7 am. Small fire started in Highlands, but rain helped keep it small. Below is the lightning radar.

Oops … Should have had my coffee first, or gotten the sleep out of my eyes. The rain RATE was 2.54″/hour. I only received .06″ in that cloud burst. My bad! At 5:30 am, I received 2 and 1/2″ of rain in mere minutes. Wow!

I woke around 1:30 am to an amazing light show to my south. The sky is still being lit up every 30 secs or so, now at 2 am. It is far enough away that I can not hear the thunder I can only imagine is crackling through the atmosphere. My SLO weather caster tweets that there has been lightning and rain in SLO Co for the last hour. imageI checked wildCAD to see it hasn’t been updated since last night around 5 pm, but that there were several wildfire starts to the south, including a single tree lightning strike. I can only hope these are accompanied by rain. My cousin’s son said it rained the entire time he drove from Hesperian to Pismo yesterday, per a conversation I had with my aunt last night. We have no rain here, but at least the wild winds I had all day yesterday have died. It is quiet, for now.