[pct-l] historic weather data for California

[DPlotnikoff at mercurynews.com (Plotnikoff, David)]

>From: scott deputy <oz4130@yahoo.com>
>Subject: [pct-l] weather log 
>To: pct-l@mailman.backcountry.net
>Message-ID: <20040108031249.33624.qmail@web60502.mail.yahoo.com>
>Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
>
>
>This topic may have floated around some time ago but I was unable to find
it.  Does   anyone >know of an online journal that documents daily weather
conditions on a thruhike.  I'm   mainly >interested in high and low
temperatures,  I'm trying to figure out how few clothes I will need to
>carry starting at Campo and what might need to be changed when I enter the
Sierra.        I'm >planning on starting around the middle of April. 




Scott, the CA Dept. of Water Resources has all its snow and river monitors,
plus other weather stations, networked on the Web. It's very simple to look
at a station near or on the trail and examine the historic highs, lows,
rain, snow for any month in any year going back sometimes to the 50s. The
form online isn't perfectly intuitive.You'll have to play with it.
Essentially, you give it a date range, a sensor number and the type of data
you want and it plots it graphically. This has been VERY helpful to me in
planning for typical nighttime low temps, knowing when a section of trail
might be reasonably clear of snow, what the chance of rain is on a certain
section during a certain week or month of the year, etc ... And, as everyone
else here has already emphasized: Every year is different. Historic
performance is no indicator of future conditions. But you knew that. 

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/




David Plotnikoff
San Jose Mercury News
(408) 920-5867
dplotnikoff@mercurynews.com