Actual, real rain this early Wednesday, splashing across California’s north coast, and not just here, but this is a supposedly-goodly storm for northern California, bringing some way-needed wet.
Rainfall totals along the shoreline are hard to judge, but from weather maps, the wet looks real-wet for all of the region, and some strong winds, maybe gusts up to 40 mph.

Rain also expected down in the Bay Area, even more in Lake County, where firefighters could get some wet respite in the battle against another ‘unprecedented‘ and horrific wildfire. And this state oddity: ‘Meanwhile, a late-summer storm in Southern California brought more than two inches of rain to downtown Los Angeles on Tuesday, making it the third-wettest September storm there since the 1870s, officials said.’

Weather in the nowadays.

(Illustration: Pablo Picasso’s ‘Musician, Dancer, Goat & Bird,‘ found here).

And currently, if you’re a observant person, there’s a difference between weather, and climate — (NASA): ‘The difference between weather and climate is that weather consists of the short-term (minutes to months) changes in the atmosphere…In short, climate is the description of the long-term pattern of weather in a particular area.’
The fly in the soup, though, is climate change, which is shifting the weather.

Although I follow my local weather reports for the North Coast and surrounding environs at least on a daily basis (via WunderBlog and NWS), a noted absence is climate information, or how our weather here on this little stretch of coast is influenced by the climate of the region — and nowadays, climate is crucial in understanding shit.
Now there’s a new Website in operation, WXshift, handled by one of the best sources of environmental news around anywhere, Climate Central, where there’s data on the overall pattern of our local habitat.
This morning for instance, WXshift shows a graph depicting the month of September for California’s north coast has been getting warmer since 1970, even as the rest of the US follows suit.

Some points about WXshift from yesterday’s Climate Progress:

Richard Wiles, senior vice president for program strategy and integration for Climate Central, thought of the idea for WXshift about three years ago.
To him, the idea of giving people climate data with their weather forecast just seemed obvious.
“Weather is how people experience climate,” he told ThinkProgress.
The weather forecast, he said, is “the easiest, simplest way to get the facts on climate change to the broadest audience. Everybody cares about the weather … and climate is the future of weather.”
The website, which pulls from 100 years of U.S. temperature data from more than 2,000 weather stations, also lays out ten “climate indicators,” including extreme heat, ocean acidification, sea level rise, and El Niño.
Each indicator has facts on how it contributes to climate change, or how climate change contributes to it — the site explains, for instance, how El Niño contributes to elevated temperatures, and also how climate change could increase the likelihood of extreme El Niños and La Niña events.
These climate indicators “take climate change and present this bulletproof argument,” Wiles said.
“If you look at all of those, you come out with one conclusion. There’s no way around it when you’re done with those ten.
But Wiles said allowing people to see how climate change has affected their cities and states over time may present even more compelling data on the planet’s warming trend.
“It’s really hard to argue with a local temperature trend that shows that summers are warming or winters are warming,” he said.
“It strips away all the political baggage that tends to be attached to climate change, and just gives people the information in a way you’re more likely to accept it.”

And tonight, we get to witness in a sickening display of asshole-in-charge politics as the GOP will attempt its second debate of the 2016 season — climate change was mentioned only once in the August debate, that in the second-tier candidate bullshit -session, but not at all in the prime-time assembly.

Not the climate for brains…or the sense to weather the problem.