Watch the ebb or flow of emphermal fog at the Golden Gate or the rapid movements of puffball cumulus clouds during a summer day and you quickly realize that forecasting cloud coverage is a crap shoot. Clouds form and evaporate with random tem
perature changes, elevation change, relative humidity etc.
But super computer models can consume all that information and sometimes make usesful forecasts about clouds.
For example take a look at this graphic for yesterday. Each of the data points shows the % cloud overage a particular model suggested for each hour during the day. The black line shows the average clouds coverage of this Multimodel Ensemble Forecast. At the time I issued my forecast yesterday at line was at about 50% cloud coverage of the general area.
50% cloud coverage over the Coastal Valleys is simply not enouogh to allow for the warming we needed to stir low-teens local sea beezes much less create a gradient strong enough to curve the El Norte winds outside to our beaches.
But Weatherflow also runs a super high resolution cloud model over Baja’s East Cape. This model also showed about 50% coverage but it also showed a hole opening in the clouds due to heating.
I gambled that that hole would last long enough to allow some up and down mid to upper-teens winds for La Ventana. As this satellite animation shows… I was lost.
