Coyote (Sunday Morning Quarterbacking the Weather)

by Rob Hawley

Robert Armstrong, Sean McCauliff, and myself went to Coyote. At sunset there were bands of clouds to the south moving westward. Coyote was north of these. By twilight the sky was clear, but the humidity was rapidly rising. By 8PM we were losing equipment to dew (my finder was dewed up). The sky was not as dark as normal due the extra humidity. We did get a lot of observing in. About 10PM the wind picked up. About 11PM fog started to cover the skies. At midnight driving home you could see that the area was generally affected.

RANT WARNING

A lot of folks avoided Coyote last night because of the CSC. That was too bad. The weather was clear until about 11PM when a regional fog layer covered the entire area from Gilroy north. Was the CSC correct? No. The CSC does not predict fog. If you looked at the underlying data by clicking on one of the cloud coverage boxes) you would see that it was predicting an isolated region of clouds over Gilroy. That is the type of forecast I usually consider suspect.

This is the source of info I use (not surprisingly) http://www.sjaa.net/weather/sites.html#coyote-park

Including the satellites from http://www.sjaa.net/weather

They showed bands of clouds rotating around a weather system to the south. That plus the aviation forecast to me said go.

So would another site have been better? Obviously I was only in one place, but this is the info I can glean from the weather sources.

Aviation reports (METARS)

Sonoma	ceiling at 100 - 300 feet AGL
SFO	ceiling at 1400 ft (after midnight)
San Jose	ceiling at 11,000 ft then 1100 ft (after midnight)
Salinas	overcast cloud deck at 1600 - 1800 feet AGL

From this I would suspect that Coe and Fremont Peak would affected. Montebello and Lake Sonoma may have been better.

Are the aviation forecast perfect? No. That is why the SJAA weather site offers a number of different sources.

Posted on sf-bay-tac Nov 07, 2004 10:21:04 PT
Converted by report.pm 1.2 Jan 21, 2005 00:09:19 PT