WEATHER UPDATE

All hurricane and tropical storm watches and warnings have ended for Orange County. Weather totals from Hurricane Milton:

• Highest wind gusts measured at 87 mph
• More than 10 inches of rain in parts of Orange County (I record 12 inches)
• Over 42 tornado warnings issued across Central Florida

SHELTERS

Orange County sheltered more than 2600 people from Hurricane Milton. As of 3 p.m., Thursday, Oct. 10, 2024, the following shelters are closed:

• Carver Middle School
• Colonial High School
• Lake Buena Vista High School
• Lake Nona High School
• Ocoee High School
• Odyssey Middle School
• Timber Springs Middle School
• Union Park Middle School
• Wedgefield K-8 School

…
POWER OUTAGES

Utility crews are currently assessing outages and working to restore power to customers as quickly and safely as possible.

Duke: 110,000 customers in Orange County are currently affected by power outages.

OUC: 61,125 customers in Orange County are currently affected by power outages.

Report outages to your electric provider in Orange County.
…

Everything government related is closed until Monday of next week. We might get some garbage pickup tomorrow or Saturday, otherwise we’re going to have to wait until next week.

As far as my household, we never lost power and no trees were blown down that I can see. There may be others further into our neighborhood, but around my immediate section nothing horrible.

We sat up the entire night waiting and listening, napping when we could. Milton charged across central Florida so fast the worst parts were over us and gone in about four hours. We were pretty much wiped out after sunrise, and I took a long two hour nap around mid-afternoon. My wife was doing the same. Even the little animals seemed tired and napped pretty much the entire day, more-so than usual.

But here we are 24 hours later. I am so thankful we got through this.

That original post where I said I wasn’t going to post for the month of October looks pretty much trash at this point.

I’m sitting here waiting for Milton to hit Tampa/St. Pete and then come roaring up I-4 and across central Florida, including Orlando and my neighborhood. I’ve prepared as much as I can, probably the best I’ve ever done in the 40 years I’ve been living here. But this latest storm has raised my anxiety to the highest level it’s ever been before a storm. Just about the entirety of the west coast of Florida, along with a few counties on the east coast, have been ordered to evacuate.

Part of my anxiety is the vacuum of leadership at the level of governor. We have a little man who has a bobble head, and who has been refusing calls from the sitting Vice President Harris because he thought it too political. What a complete and utter ass.

Anyway…

A week before all of this I purchased and built a new kitchen cart on wheels, complete with built-in drawers and cabinets so that I could get pots and small electric appliances off the other cabinets and uncover the existing cabinet tops for a better cooking experience in the kitchen. I thought it was for the kitchen. The cats have decided it makes a great extension for playing, a second level to traverse through the kitchen.

If I didn’t have all the little creatures I don’t know what I’d be doing right now. Their presence gives me comfort.

Beryl is still alive and causing grief, this time within the Gulf. And if the forecasts are to be believed, it will re-strengthen into another hurricane before striking the Texas coast. How close it will come to major hurricane status (category 3 and higher) is anyone’s guess.

Because the NHC map never shows major urban centers, I snipped a section of Google maps in that area to show major urban areas under threat. The biggest is Houston, which always floods given any excuse of rain. The worst example of recent Houston flooding was with Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Harvey dropped anywhere from 30 to 60 inches of rain on the Houston metro area before it moved north-east into the US mid-west, causing flooding and tornadoes all the way before finally dissipating.

I should note that Beryl’s Gulf track has been steadily moving eastward every day. When the seven day track first reached into the Gulf, Beryl was forecast to make landfall on Mexico. I wouldn’t be surprised if Beryl’s forecast track shifts even further eastward. It is, after all, a guesstimate at best.

Links

hurricane beryl and the 2024 season

Last night, around mid-night, we had an hour’s worth of thunderstorms come rolling over the house. None of the iPhone’s weather apps forecast the rain. I only got a snapshot of the precipitation from the Apple Weather app after the rain started to fall. In the mean time all the little cats came into the bedroom to be with me, either up on the bed next to me, or else under the bed. Luke in particular came back and stood next to the bed and vocalized up to me, then leaped up to settle next to my feet. He hasn’t done anything like that in years, but last night sent him back to stay with his person. I suspect it’s going to occur more often as the climate, and the weather, grows more extreme.

I’m no weather person but I would call what the precipitation view of Apple Maps showed as a micro front. It formed north-to-south and rolled out towards the Atlantic coast at a rather rapid clip. This isn’t the first time I’ve experienced something like this, but it was one of the worst. Constant loud thunder and heavy downpours accompanied this meteorological event. It showed up without warning, and then left rather rapidly. When I went out this morning there was still standing water around my street where the nearly seven hours after that rain storm was insufficient time for full runoff to occur.

This is unusual for mid-Florida. It’s just a taste of what south Florida has been going through this year. Florida has an idiot governor who won’t do a damn thing to help mitigate the destructive effects.

As a 40-year resident of Florida I religiously follow the National Hurricane Center ( https://www.nhc.noaa.gov ) website, especially the storm track map. I’m still in shock from the 2004 hurricane season, starting with Charlie (category 4), then Frances (category 4), and then Jeanne (category 3). These were all in the span of nearly two months, from early August for Charlie to late September for Jeanne. I wasn’t prepared for the ferocity nor the frequency of major hurricanes that came across central Florida that year. Neither was anyone else; for example we were without power for weeks. My daughter almost didn’t make it up to her first freshman term at Florida State University because of the damage. In the end we left with the entire family just so we could rent a hotel room with air conditioning and hot water while we moved my oldest daughter into her dorm room. When we returned home I spent weeks cutting up and hauling off fallen trees around the neighborhood, as well as helping fix damage to every structure in our neighborhood. We all pitched in.

Now I’m watching this hurricane season open up with a bang as it were with Beryl, a category 4 hurricane charging across the souther Caribbean Sea on its way to the Yucatan Peninsula. Along the way it’s devistating island nations such as St Vincent and the Grenadines, Barbados, Grenada, and St Lucia. St Vincent and the Grenadines and Grenada are bearing the brunt of this storm; reports are in of complete power outage and thousands streaming into shelters to survive Beryl’s passage.

The only reason Beryl’s not making a beeline up to Florida and CONUS is because of another climate change induced disaster, a huge high pressure system sitting over the mid-West and mid-Atlantic areas, causing a baking heat dome over that part of the United States.

This the world we now have, caused by centuries of fossil fuel burning stretching back centuries to the Industrial Revolution. Out carbon output has only grown much worse during the period starting from the mid-Twentieth century, and even with all the heat waves across all the northern continents, we refuse to slow down, let alone stop.

How are we to justify how our actions with regards to fossil fuel usage amplifies such environmental destruction and even death, to people caught in the path of these destructive forces? We can’t.

There are already consequences showing up from this huge rise in global temperature anomalies. For one example, the crazy bad weather over Orlando this evening as you can see in the screen capture at the start.

And then this weather warning from Orange County:

Severe Thunderstorm WarningBeginning: 2024-01-09T22:21:00Ending: 2024-01-09T23:00:00New AlertTHE NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE IN MELBOURNE HAS ISSUED A* SEVERE THUNDERSTORM WARNING FOR...SEMINOLE COUNTY IN EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA...CENTRAL LAKE COUNTY IN EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA...ORANGE COUNTY IN EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA...VOLUSIA COUNTY IN EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA...NORTHWESTERN OSCEOLA COUNTY IN EAST CENTRAL FLORIDA...* UNTIL 600 PM EST.* AT 521 PM EST, SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS WERE LOCATED ALONG A LINEEXTENDING FROM NEAR PIERSON TO ZELLWOOD TO 12 MILES WEST OF FOURCORNERS, MOVING NORTHEAST AT 70 MPH.HAZARD...60 MPH WIND GUSTS.SOURCE...RADAR INDICATED.IMPACT...EXPECT DAMAGE TO ROOFS, SIDING, AND TREES.* LOCATIONS IMPACTED INCLUDE...ORLANDO, DELTONA, DAYTONA BEACH, KISSIMMEE, AND PORT ORANGE.PRECAUTIONARY/PREPAREDNESS ACTIONS...REMAIN ALERT FOR A POSSIBLE TORNADO! TORNADOES CAN DEVELOP QUICKLYFROM SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS. IF YOU SPOT A TORNADO GO AT ONCE TO ASMALL CENTRAL ROOM IN A STURDY STRUCTURE.FOR YOUR PROTECTION MOVE TO AN INTERIOR ROOM ON THE LOWEST FLOOR OF ABUILDING.A TORNADO WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT UNTIL 900 PM EST FOR EAST CENTRALFLORIDA

All this on 9 January. I’ve lived here since 1984, and I’ve never seen or experienced anything like this, until today. This is now the new normal, and it’s not good at all.

Links

First results are in: 2023 temperatures were stunningly warm — https://arstechnica.com/science/2024/01/first-results-are-in-2023-temperatures-were-stunningly-warm/

Live in a neighborhood long enough and you’ll see trends that come and go. A trend I always hate to see is the cutting down of trees around the neighborhood. I have no idea what triggers this trend, except when I start getting junk mail in my mailbox or business cards stuck in the front door of my house advertising tree services, which is nothing more than an excuse to convince the homeowner they have a diseased tree that needs to come down pronto.

I’ve seen four trees come down in as many months, and all of them on the route I take with my two dogs when we go out on our daily walks. This is the forth one I captured this morning.

My wife and I caught a tree service busily cutting it down yesterday when I was driving back from my wife’s doctor’s appointment. It always saddens me to see this happening because of how dire global warming has become; all these trees provided shade, and where they’ve all be cut down is now an open to the sun area. The rest of the streets we walk down have dappled shade because of the trees by the streets, but the holes where these trees have come down will allow the micro climates where they used to stand grow even hotter in the summers to come. This past summer was hot enough. I can only imagine what the future summers will be like, especially without the shade provided by mature oak trees.

Today is a bad air day over metro Orlando and central Florida in general.

It started yesterday. I first noticed it in the afternoon when I looked up overhead and thought the atmospheric color was a bit off. I checked the Apple weather app, and for once it was shockingly accurate; the entire central Florida area was under an air quality alert for sensitive groups, which I think includes me now that I’m nearly 70.

I dug a little deeper and discovered that Canadian wildfire smoke was being diverted south along the Atlantic seaboard and over central Florida. According to various news outlets, the smoke and haze are supposed to clear out by Wednesday, tomorrow.

If the people of Florida can’t accept this as another blunt sign that we’re in the middle of an environmental catastrophe, I don’t know what will. The Canadian wildfire smoke  affecting weather and health down in Florida is, as the Baptists like to say, a come-to-Jesus moment.

Tropical storm Idalia is finally moving off from North Carolina and southern Virginia, into the Atlantic. In spite of earlier speculation by some forecasters 48 hours ago, Idalia will not circle around and hit Florida again. Yes, there was some talk that Idalia would circle back after entering the Atlanta and cross Florida as a “regular” old tropical storm. Instead it looks like it will chase after Franklin across the northern Atlantic.

Now begins the cleanup phase (which had already started in those areas Idalia had passed through). It’s going to be long and expensive. And for those communities on the Gulf coast of Florida, they’re going to have to ask themselves if they really want to rebuild in the area, or move away. Idalia’s Florida landfall wasn’t nearly as destructive to human property as Ian’s because the Big Bend area isn’t as heavily developed as on Florida’s southern Gulf coast, but it was destructive enough, especially as it traveled up through Florida into south Georgia and beyond.

Idalia was frightening to me because it remained a hurricane all the way into south Georgia. After traveling across the lower southeastern U.S. it still remained an organized tropical storm.  While hurricane Idalia was still in south Georgia, northern edges of the storm reached as far north as Atlanta’s southern suburbs. That’s a huge storm. Hurricanes are growing more violent (category 4 is no longer unusual) and far larger than “storms of old.” The old idea you could move further inland to avoid such storms is now a thing of the past.

And we still have three more months in the hurrican season. September 1st is tomorrow, and September is the height of the season. What are we going to face over the next 90 days?

Details

The app in the capture is Apple’s Weather app on macOS. This post was written on a 13″ 2020 M1 MacBook Pro, which I purchased on sale December 2021. I used the WordPress stand-alone application instead of the web page.

Idalia appears to be coming ashore near Steinhatchee, Florida. As I was writing this post reports came in that Idalia made landfall at Keaton Beach, just northwest of Steinhatchee, at around 8am. Wind speeds had dropped just enough that Idalia was “downgraded” from category 4 to category 3. But still, it’s a devastating disaster from Tampa all up the Gulf coast to Tallahassee.

What is remarkable is to look at the map and see Idalia’s influence up into south Georgia, all the way to Savannah and Charleston, SC. It also shows why you don’t want a hurricane to pass under you. The northwest quadrant is where the most wind and rain is generated in a hurricane. Orlando is still getting rain bands, with intermittent rain and wind. Nothing like Florida’s Big Bend area.

Watching and waiting for Hurricane Idalia to pass us. Current forecast tracking of the eye has Idalia going north of Tampa, which puts it a good ways north of Orlando. This was taken from my iPhone around 8am this morning with Apple’s weather app in map mode. I’ve also been keeping tabs on the hurricane with Weather Underground’s spaghetti modeling, which keeps consistently predicting a track that side-swipes Tallahassee. That’s not so good for Tallahassee, as it tends to flood in weather such as this.

Models are already forecasting this to be a major hurricane before landfall, which means category 3 or more. Where-ever it finally comes ashore, a lot of people who can ill afford the damage are going to suffer quite a bit of it. Florida still a lot of folks down in southwest Florida who are still trying to recover from last year’s hurricane Ian.

Update 5:30 Local Orlando

The rain bands are now coming through.

Ian has reformed and strengthened back into at least a category one hurricane. It may continue to strengthen up one more category before landfall. Keep in mind that the warm waters of the Gulf Stream, which starts in the Gulf of Mexico, flows up the Atlantic seaboard, over which Ian is moving right now. More weather energy for Ian. And if it keeps on the current track, then the mid-West which includes Ohio is right in its track as a depression. A very large, rain-maker depression.

Once again you can get a much better idea of how Ian is effecting Florida’s weather. Note that tropical storm winds are reaching as far south-west as Tampa. Still. Florida won’t be free of Ian’s influence until Ian makes landfall on South Carolina, sometime Friday afternoon.

Believe it or not the overall number of Floridian’s without power has dropped some 200,000 customers. I have no idea where, but the total is going down. It’s going to be a long process, and there will be substantial numbers who will go for a week or more without power, just like I did back in 2004 with Charley in Orlando. I have hovered over the county of Orlando, where I live, to give you a feeling of how many are without power. Keep in mind Orange County and Orlando were “merely” side-swiped by tropical storm Ian, not hit full-on by category four hurricane Ian. And yet we still suffered damage and flooding, nothing like Punta Gorda and Fort Myers, but still.

A few photos from TheGuardian.

This is the rich section of Fort Myers, right on the shore. All those rich people’s boats in the foreground, and all those condos rising up in the back. This is the aftermath when you mix a category four hurricane with far too much expensive land development right on the Gulf shore. I have no idea how much is insured, and how much might be made whole by insurance. But this development should not be here. And yet it is, and representative of too many communities on both the Gulf and Atlanta coasts. Think of Miami…

I say “possible retirement community” because this is the type of inexpensive construction that my wife’s mother used to build her retirement home up in Ocala, Florida. Simple frame houses with a car port on each side. And if this is the case, then how will these people pay to rebuild their homes?

It goes without saying that a lot of the critically damaged structures won’t come back. The people on whose backs this will predominantly fall will be those who are the most economically disadvantaged, such as retirees on fixed incomes. Our current state government is woefully ill equipped to deal with this on all levels.

The National Hurricane Center’s current track shows the extend of the winds. Nearly all of the Florida peninsula is covered, including south-east Georgia and the southern end of South Carolina. Let’s look at the Washington Post’s tracker map.

The Washington Post map is a more refined view of the NHC map. The red ring around the center of tropical storm Ian shows the extent, as of 8 am Thursday, of Ian’s tropical force winds. You can look at space photos of Ian all day long, but you really need these maps to show the effect of those storms. And this storm, even though it’s now “only” a tropical storm, never-the-less is effecting three southern states. Florida won’t see the last of Ian until mid-day Friday. This is one more example of what global warming/climate change has produced, far more severe hurricanes.

I was living in Orlando in 2004 when hurricane Charley came ashore at the same spot Ian did in 2004. Charley passed over Orlando and tore up the area to the point that we were without power for over a week, back when Florida Power serviced the region. That was the year my first daughter was starting as a freshman at Florida State University in Tallahassee. When we finally left in the family van to drive her up, power was still out. It came back on two hours after we left (our next door neighbor called us). Charley was about half the size of Ian. Ian caused less damage to us this time for a number of reasons:

• Our electricity provider, Florida Power, sold the service area we live in to Duke Energy. Duke has spent years and money strengthening the electrical infrastructure in their service area to the point where this time, unbelievably, we did not loose power as soon as the first bit of wind started to blow and rain started to fall. We still have the occasional outage due to idiots driving cars and smashing them into power poles, but they are thankfully infrequent and very short lived.
• Ian made a critical turn further east right before it made landfall.
• Ian was slower moving and dissipated considerably more energy as it moved through the Florida peninsula. By the time it got close enough to Orlando to cause issues it was far weaker than Charley had been. Regardless of how events turned out here, the tremendous damage to southwest Florida is far greater with Ian than it was with Charley. Tampa in 2004 only felt winds between 25 to 35 mph from Charley. Wind speeds were at least double that with Ian. And if the earlier forecast with Ian making landfall at Tampa had held true, then Tampa would have been effectively wiped off the map.

Extreme weather events like Ian are now are future.

I’m using the Washington Post storm tracker as it provides the clearest forecast track of Ian.

Ian is now “just” a tropical storm. Over the last 12 hours, Ian dropped from a near-category 5 hurricane to a sprawling tropical storm. There’s still lots of wind and rain and I received a flash flood alert from Orange County/Orlando until just about now. I can see lots of debris down, such as branches and leaves everywhere. But we’ve suffered nothing in comparison to Florida’s Gulf coast where Ian came ashore. To give an idea of how bad it is for Florida, here’s a current power outage map for Florida ( https://poweroutage.us/area/state/florida ).

The total number without power right now is sobering: 2.5 million. The worst hit are all the counties showing red on the map. Even Orange county is, well, orange. You can see broadly the swath Ian cut across the Florida peninsula. You can see Ian’s reach up to the northern counties with the green. Ian was a monster storm. It’s going to take a while to pick up from this one. And then we’re going to have to think good and hard about building right on both coasts.

Ian is getting ready to make landfall at Port Charlotte, Florida. I’ve read reports that at least 100,000 Floridians have already lost power before official landfall. A bit of research shows that there’s about 800,000 people in that general area, less than the three million that live in Tampa, where Ian was initially forecast to come ashore 48 hours ago. I’ve read reports that it’s a category four hurricane, then reports it’s a category five. What category it is is now a moot point. Ian is a big, fat, destructive storm that will linger over western central Florida for anywhere from 24 to 36 hours.

Here’s another view of the storm, courtesy of the Washington Post ( https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2022/09/24/ian-storm-tracker-map/ ). The storm track and map are a lot clearer. Both tracks show Ian’s strength dropping drastically between Wednesday 8 pm and Thursday morning 8 am.

Right now there’s a steady light rain. There is a steady, light wind, with some gusting. The rain isn’t continuous. For example, it stopped long enough this morning for me to get the dogs outside to do there business, more than once. All the animals are anxious, and are clustering around the humans in the house. It’s not unusual to sit in my chair and have at least two lap cats, sometimes three. The others just find a very close spot to me and sit.

It’s not like I’m unaware of the rest of the world. I’m still reading about the Ukraine war, the sabotage of Nordstream 1 and Nordstream 2 in the Baltic Sea, the cratering in value of the British Pound and all that that implies, the far right political swing (again) in Italy, as well as all the continuing political shenanigans and legal gyrations that T**** and his minions are performing.

It’s moments like these that I feel like I’m living in a real-world version of the movie “Don’t Look Up.”

Update 2 pm

The Orlando mayor has requested that all non-essential surface traffic and travel end by this time. Ian is now tracking somewhere over, or very near, Orange County, Florida, where I live. The rain has stopped for at least an hour, but the winds are slowly rising. Ian’s eye wall has come ashore at Fort Myers, Florida, south of Punta Gorda. Winds are 155 mph, category four.

What a difference 24 hours makes. In yesterday’s post the National Hurricane Center had Ian making landfall at (or near) Cedar Key, north of Tampa. Tonight Ian’s path has changed drastically such that it now looks like it will make landfall south of Tampa around Punta Gorda, about half way between Sarasota and Fort Myers. Then it seems to head north-north-east. If it keeps to the current forecast track then it will deliver misery to Jacksonville and the Savannah/Brunswich Georgia area, and maybe even Charleston, South Carolina.

At this point in time all we can do is wait. The rain forecast was been pushed back a good six hours; it was supposed to arrive at 1pm, instead arriving around 7pm. Right now it’s a very light drizzle, and there’s no wind blowing. It’s quiet, and a bit eerie. My wife and I have taken care of all that we can, including getting all our medications refilled. I have water on hand, and plenty of other supplies, especially for the animals. All we can do now is wait and ride it out when Ian finally arrives.

Not much to add at this point, except to say that once again a Gulf hurricane is forecast to make landfall on or near Cedar Key, Florida. Where is Cedar Key? Just look at the following map.

I have no idea why Gulf hurricanes hit Cedar Key more than any other spot, but they do, or they seem to. All joking aside Cedar Key is a series of islands at sea level. If Ian comes in as strong as they forecast it to be, then Cedar Key is going to get seriously hit. I hope all residents evacuate before Ian arrives, and that no-one is dumb enough to think they can “ride it out.”

Every May I start checking the National Hurricane Center’s website, at least twice/day. So far this year the Atlantic forecasts have been clear. Until this morning. This is the first disturbance of the 2022 hurricane season, which has yet to officially start. When I checked the website again this early evening, the disturbance had strengthened. Historically the really bad systems come off the coast of Africa. I have no doubt this will become a tropical storm over the next few days. If it strengthens further… Well, I await the grim news this weekend.

I’ve decided not to write daily entries in my climate change note book. It became too depressing for me to document, especially with stories flooding in about the impact of climate change and global warming here in the US as well as around the world. I stopped on Sunday, Juneteenth/Flather’s Day, just to have a day off from writing and to celebrate, in my own small way, Juneteenth. I am no fan of Father’s Day which is nothing more than a cynical appeal to our sentimentality by major corporations and for those corporations to grab ever more cash out of our wallets.

When I tried to add another entry to my climate change note book on the following Monday I just could not do it. Nor can I do it today. What I’ll probably do is add an entry once/week, like my Caturday and Friday Funnies entries. Maybe a Sunday entry.

Besides the problems with global warming there’s Russia’s unlawful ongoing war in Ukraine, and Russia’s threats against those who oppose that unlawful war. If Europe thinks they can ignore or appease Russia, meaning Putin, then they’re out of their pea pickin’ minds.

France, Spain and other western European nations braced for a sweltering weekend that is set to break records and sparked concern about forest fires and the effects of climate change.

Temperatures already nudged over 40C (104F) in parts of France on Friday.

The weather on Saturday will represent a peak of a June heatwave that is in line with warnings from scientists that such phenomena will now hit earlier than usual because of climate change.

Temperatures are due to relent slightly from Sunday, with thunderstorms forecast in parts of France and elsewhere in Europe.

But French state weather forecaster Meteo France said June temperature records had already been beaten in 11 areas on Friday and could reach as high as 42C in some areas on Saturday.

In Spain, forest fires burned nearly 9,000 hectares (22,240 acres) of land in the north-west Sierra de la Culebra region on Friday, forcing about 200 people from their homes, regional authorities said.

Link: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/jun/18/europe-heatwave-france-braces-for-record-breaking-temperatures-as-spain-battles-forest-fires

Today’s Orlando weather:

• Morning low at 6:00 am was 80° F
• Today’s high at 2:00 pm was 95° F
• Humidity was 50%
• No rain
• Mostly hazy conditions

Today’s weather was peculiar. This was supposed to be a big rain day, with all three iOS apps I have on my iPhone (Apple Weather, Dark Sky, and Hello Weather) forecasting rain starting at 2 pm. The problem with that forecast is it was wrong, at least in my neighborhood. The skies grew cloudy, then overcast, and I could hear the occasional bit of thunder in the far distance, but we never got any rain. I even had apps saying we were getting rain, yet when I went outside to look, it was dry. The temperature (thankfully!) did drop, by ten degrees by 5 pm.

I’m to the point where I’m purchasing components to build several small weather stations for my back yard, tied to a central station in the house with LoRa, so I can have greater accuracy with local weather forecasting. I’ve come quite a way with MicroPython and ESP-IDF on Espressif boards, pushed there in part because I can’t purchase any Raspberry Pies from anyone. I’ve discovered that I can write sophisticated applications in Python or C++ for those boards, which are much smaller than a Raspberry Pi and consume a lot less power. Those boards, and specifically, those chips on those boards, are still available. I’m really disappointed in the Raspberry Pi Foundation. The Foundation’s original “promise” to be there for the experimenter is garbage.