Record high mid-winter temps from 28 to 31 °C and wildfires hit Southern California suggesting drought may continue for another year
By Jan Wesner Childs 11/02/2020 in The Weather Channel: Homes Burned, Evacuations Ordered Amid Southern California Wildfires: Southern California is experiencing unusually hot weather, combined with Santa Ana winds and an ongoing drought. Temperatures soared into the mid- to upper 80s in some areas Thursday with daily record highs noted by the National Weather Service in Ventura, Santa Barbara, San Luis Obispo and Los Angeles counties.
See also: By Madeline Scheinost 09/02/2022 in The Weather Channel Does California’s Dry Start to 2022 Mean the Drought Is Locked in Until Next Winter?: California started the year with a dent in a multi-year drought thanks to a wet December, but a dry spell to start the year threatens to counteract the progress that was made and prolong the drought well into 2022.
Some call me a 'climate scientist'. I'm not. What I am is an 'Earth systems generalist'.
Born in 1939, I grew up with passionate interests in both science and engineering. I learned to read from my father's university textbooks in geology and paleontology, and dreamed of building nuclear powered starships. Living on a yacht in Southern California I grew up surrounded by (and often immersed in) marine and estuarine ecosystems while my father worked in the aerospace engineering industry.
After studying university physics for three years, dyslexia with numbers convinced me to change my focus to biology. I completed university as an evolutionary biologist (PhD Harvard, 1973). My principal research project involved understanding how species' genetic systems regulated the evolution and speciation of North America's largest and most widespread lizard genus. Then for several years as an academic biologist I taught a range of university subjects as diverse as systematics, biogeography, cytogenetics, comparative anatomy and marine biology.
In Australia, from 1980, I was involved in various activities around the emerging and rapidly evolving microcomputing technologies culminating in 2 years involvement in the computerization of the emerging Bank of Melbourne.
In 1990 I joined a startup engineering company that had just won the contract to build a new generation of 10 frigates for Australia and New Zealand. In 2007 I retired from the head office of Tenix Defence, then Australia's largest defence engineering contractor, after a 17½ year career as a documentation and knowledge management systems analyst and designer. At Tenix I reported to the R&D manager under the GM Engineering, and worked closely with support and systems engineers on the ANZAC Ship Project to solve documentation and engineering change management issues that risked the project 100s of millions of dollars in cost and years of schedule overruns. All 10 ships had been delivered on time, on budget to happy customers against the fixed-price and fixed schedule contract.
Before, during, and after these two main gigs I also did a lot of other things that contribute to my general understanding of complex dynamical systems involving multiple components with non-linear and sometimes chaotically interacting components; e.g., 'Earth systems'.
Earth's Climate System is the global heat engine driven by the transport and conversions of energy between the incoming solar radiation striking the planet, and the infrared radiation of heat away from the planet to the cold dark universe.
As Climate Sentinel News Editor, my task is to identify and understand quirks and problems in the operation of this complex heat engine that threaten human existence, and explain to our readers how they can help to solve some of the critical issues that are threatening their own existence.
