On a completely different subject: can we have some sunspots please?

I have been following this solar minimum since it started. After all, by education I'm an astronomer. We are or were going for a period of maximum insolation on this our home planet. It made sense to me that temperatures were getting higher. And then the Sun did something nobody had anticipated to the extent it's happening. The solar activity minimum was anticipated. It goes up and down every 23 years (or so) (or so??!!!). There are not enough data of sunspots to analyze far enough back. I looked at them and decided that there aren't. There is more than one period in there, that much I could tell. I happen to be married to this guy who integrated the atmospheric spectrum in the infrared and found that water in the atmosphere is much more important than CO2. I kinda knew that but then, I've been in infrared astronomy for a few years. Tracking some data, the temperature dropped after 9/11/2001 when all planes were grounded. That wasn't burned fuel, it was contrails.

Now here I am after the lowest rainfall year on record for Hilo:
(those are my data points for low rainfall, under 100", in hundredths of inches)
2010 6329
1983 6809
1962 7145
1995 8592
1932 8968 (data point from newspaper)
1981 8991
1977 9038
2003 9132
1972 9885
1975 9993

We have some El Ninos to account for too (definitely the mid90s and 2003)

so were getting to

2010 6329
1983 6809
1981 8991
1962 7145
1932 8968 (data point from newspaper)

omitting a few. It doesn't quite match, but I am writing this off the top of my head and not taking any submarine volcano eruptions into account (the latter is by private communication from my former coworker Firmin Oliveira - regarding submarine volcano eruptions possibly causing El Ninos).

I originally wrote this almost a month ago - and thought I had published it but apparently I didn't. By now we're looking back at another very dry January. Not quite as dry as last year, but the rainfall at the airport was still only 38% of normal and even less, 21% at the Piihonua rain gauge (still, that's better than the about 10% we had last year).

- But, we also have a few more sunspots even if January was low in those again too.

(and even if it says the post was published on Jan. 11, I didn't really finish it until Feb. 9)

Some weekend ...

Friday I took the afternoon off from work to take a lampwork friend and a friend of hers up to Mauna Kea. We had a blast, and I may add a picture of the two in the control room of the telescope where I work later.

Coming home, checking my email, I found a tsunami alert, and immediately forwarded it to my lampwork friend who was staying much closer to sea level than we live, and was going to go counting whales in the morning. Checking up on what was happening elsewhere kept me up rather late.

I got woken up by the tsunami sirens about 5:45 in the morning. Checked my email, checked the reports, sent email to the owner of the place where I had planned to be at a swap meet that morning, saying I wasn't driving down the hill (basically), and tried to get some more sleep. With the sirens going off hourly, that didn't last very long. I spent the morning glued to the TV local news live feed and watched the water going in and out of the bay. Got some more sleep after the tsunami warning was canceled.

Mind you, while this wasn't a disastrous tsunami here, it was very real, just not very big. Today's newspaper is one that I'm going to keep. What the mayor said, about Icepond running almost dry, was scary enough. Reading in the paper today that the water almost ran over the "forever bridge" - the bridge at the end of Kamehameha Avenue that too forever to rebuild - brought that home real good. I live at 750 ft elevation. By my husband's extrapolation it would take about a magnitude 11 earthquake to get to us here, but any major landslide will do the same.

Today started out normal, but if I had known that the weather front was coming down the island chain as fast as it did I clearly wouldn't have gotten 7 buckets of mulched green waste when I dumped ours to be recycled. I had some grocery shopping to do and by the time I got out it was raining. I got some of the mulch out of the truck after getting the groceries put away, but the rest may by now be floating around in the back of my truck.

I was planning on making some beads, but wasn't sure about doing that in this kind of weather, so after dealing with the rest I checked up with my lampwork friend who had been evacuated over in Kona, and was scheduled to go back home yesterday too. She did, on a red-eye, after very little to no sleep. As I saw her post I knew she was up. Waking her up even by just phone noise was the last thing I wanted to do, but she was very much awake and I'm really glad I talked to her because it made me take a brief break in the rain as the opportunity to run up the kiln and light my torch. And experiment. I'm sure I boiled some glass again, but they aren't just single color spacers this time (thanks Jill).

It's raining. Finally. I wish I had gotten more of the lawn done before it started, but unless I would have given up the being glued to the TV and made beads then, and weedwhacked that afternoon and done basically nothing today it wouldn't work. I can't type the day after I weedwhack. And I'm pretty sure I can't keep mandrels and glass steady either, though that one I haven't tried yet. I'm not sure I want to either. And this being an El Nino winter I'm sure it's going to stop raining here again too.