The forecast was for a possibility of snow today and did it snow. Wickenburg has not seen this much snow in 20 years according to town sources. Of course, we, having come here from California four years ago, were like kids with the fresh snow.
Verna got to use her snow hat that I wrote about yesterday. Click on the image to enlarge.
Snow has been forecast in Wickenburg for New Year’s Eve and Day. Verna is ready for it with her recently acquired snow hat. Click on the image to enlarge.
After the sheets of rain and the strong gusty winds subside, the aftermath of the big rainfall results in the road in front of our house flowing with whitecaps. I took this video from the garage with the wind and rain still blowing a bit. I panned up to the hill on the northeast of the property where lightning was still striking in the distance. Click on the play button to see the video.
On our way back from the Ford dealer this morning (we had to return the GMC seats for our trade-in) (love the new truck, by the way), Verna took an image of the cloudscape over the mountains in the distance as we crossed the Hassayampa River. The clouds are forming over the Bradshaw and Weaver Mountains twenty plus miles distant, while the underground riverbed dominates the foreground in this image. Click on the image to view the panorama full size.
The Hassayampa River flows underground for most of the year, but when the monsoons come, the water flows big time. This is one of the pylons under the pedestrian bridge in town that clearly shows the high water marks when the big surge comes down the river from the headwaters. When that is going on, it is NOT a good time to be anywhere below the floodplain. Click on Verna’s image to enlarge.
Last evening, we were bringing the dogs back from walking when I noticed the sun rays among the cloud build ups over the house. I call this effect a “glory,” but it does have a technical name, crepuscular rays.
Wikipedia has this about crepuscular rays:
Crepuscular rays (also known as God rays) in atmospheric optics, are rays of sunlight that appear to radiate from the point in the sky where the sun is located. These rays, which stream through gaps in clouds (particularly stratocumulus) or between other objects, are columns of sunlit air separated by darker cloud-shadowed regions. Despite seeming to converge at a point, the rays are in fact near-parallel shafts of sunlight and their apparent convergence is a perspective effect (similar, for example, to the way that parallel railway lines seem to converge at a point in the distance).
The name comes from their frequent occurrences during crepuscular hours (those around dawn and dusk), when the contrasts between light and dark are the most obvious. Crepuscular comes from the Latin word “crepusculum”, meaning twilight
