Virtual Weather Station restarted

It looks like our Virtual Weather Station software was in a hung state; the last update was showing 1:34 a.m.

I restarted the software. We're back to normal now -- just in time for a little rain...

UV sensor a little flakey

It seems all the recent wet weather has played havoc with our UV sensor; it is not going down to zero after sunset.

I've seen this before after cleaning the sensor with water; it sometimes takes several weeks to recover.

The folks at Davis recommends cleaning with ethyl alcohol rather than water. Of course, that doesn't help much when it rains heavily.

(I have no idea where to buy ethyl alcohol -- a liquor store? :-)

Large surf finally hits!

For the past week or so we've had high surf and coastal flood advisories, due mostly to the deep area of low pressure offshore combined with high astronomical tides. This has gone virtually unnoticed by us -- until this morning!

We've had quite a few waves strong enough to actually spray our living room window. Our backyard, already soaked from all the recent rain, took on quite a bit of salt water. I almost took the day off work so that I could just hang out and watch the action!

Thank god for the seawall work we did last year. I think it may have already paid for itself.

Speaking of seawalls, our neighbor Carlos brought by an article on how a seawall (similar to ours) protected a villiage in India during the recent tsunami. If I can find that article I'll post it...

Power outage this morning

We had a power outage early this morning resulting in the site being unavailable until about 10:00 a.m. There was no loss of data.