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Snow. Meh.

Alien White Stuff

Victoria isn’t supposed to get snow, dammit. We’re supposed to watch it on our TV screens and visit it on skihills. (I say this every time we get snow…)

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First Winter Storm

Victoria Airport weather as of about forty minutes ago:

METAR CYYJ 190200Z 15028G36KT 3SM -RA BR FEW008 FEW016 OVC030 07/05
A2969 RMK SF1SC2SC6 SLP055

See that “15028G36KT”? That’s wind, lots of it. 28 knots is 50km/h, sustained wind speed, with gusts up to 38 knots, 70km/h!

Victoria Harbour – right down in the city proper, about 25km south of the airport – isn’t quite as bad, but still lots of wind:

METAR CYWH 190200Z 15018G28KT 12SM -SHRA FEW010 SCT025 OVC050 08/01
A2969 RMK CF1CU2SC5 SLP055=

18G28 – the harbour’s gust speed only just matchs the sustained wind speed for the airport!

We’ve had a constant stream of weather warnings for the last 24hrs, but it took until this afternoon for the wind to really start hammering us.

Nobody makes a proper METAR-widget for WordPress. Lots of weather plugins, but there don’t seem to be any to show proper raw METARs. Perhaps when I get my PHP skillz back up to speed I’ll attempt one, using the US NOAA/FAA API.

And the otherwise-awesome Gnome panel weather applet hasĀ had its location listings gutted recently, so I can’t get both the local airport and local harbour on my panels like I used to… hopefully this regression gets fixed for Ubuntu 10.04!

Now, though, I think I’m going to make something warm and alcoholic to drink, check my flashlights, and hope the power stays on…

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Climate vs Weather

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Sun, Airplanes, and other Good Things