Beautiful Weather – Fire Danger Rising – And Possible Northern Lights!
Save your Water – Summer is here – Dry Season starts today!
Hi all! It’s been awhile since I’ve posted. Life has been so busy!! But I haven’t forgot about you, and while I was away, Alberniweather HQ got a paint job!! Isn’t it amazing!?
As for the weather, I think it’s safe to say the dry-season starts this weekend. I am sure some locations in Port Alberni will hit 30ºC today even if we don’t get there officially at the Airport. I expect temperatures over 20ºC well into next week.
The short term forecast looks dry for the next week and the long term forecast from SpotX below looks essentially dry (dark blue line: maybe 20mm total) out to the end of the month.
If you have rain barrels, hopefully you shut the valves weeks ago to get them topped up because it’s unlikely we get another major rainfall, outside a thunderstorm-type event, until September. If you have gardens, it’s time to set up the watering schedule. Watering twice a day, sunrise and sunset is best.
Fire Danger now Moderate
Expect the Fire Danger (look for Beaver Creek) rating to start rising in our area. The rating just moved from Low to Moderate at Beaver Creek with the change in the weather. Most areas on Vancouver Island are still Low but will be at Moderate by the end of the weekend.
Very active Sun producing flares and likely Aurora
The Sun has been extremely active lately!
One of my favourite apps on my iPhone is the SpaceWeatherLive app! (It also works on iPad and on Apple Silicon based macOS desktops)
You can see the forecast on the left of the image has a maximum of 8 on Saturday around 6UTC-9UTC which for us here in the Pacific timezone is tonight around midnight! Hopefully this means we could see some aurora tonight. If you’re up late, the best time to see them is when it is darkest, around 1AM-2AM.
Webcams up and running
All of the webcams are fully operational. I’ll be tweaking the angles slightly but in general I’m very very happy with them. They’re performing wonderfully. The timelapses are also all working and the 3hr and yesterday videos are uploading and linked automatically on the webpage.
Note: If you’re watching the day-videos, I’d recommend downloading them directly to your computer or smart phone (right click or hold-press on the video) as they are quite large and often don’t stream smoothly.
I am really really loving the East view with activity of the road and neighbourhood, Mt. Arrowsmith in the distance and the big sky!
A little bad news: as I was working on the scripts that create the timelapses, I accidentally deleted the images from April. The script normally copies them into an archive before deleting the originals to save space but I made an error and the archive never got created. So that’s a bummer, but it happens. So there won’t be a timelapse for April this month, but May will make up for it with three! 🙂
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