Weather It Is (Winter Fights Back)

Good afternoon:

I learned in my undergraduate biology classes that a mixture is always better than the alternative.  That is, "inbreeding" is a bad thing because recessive and sometime dangerous genes get passed on and together can express themselves in detrimental ways.

Would one say the same about the weather?  In the last couple of weeks we had a terrible and prolonged dust storm.  This was followed by a Sharav, which was accompanied by an atmospheric river of water (from the Atlantic ocean)  that led to widespread rain and flooding from the north to the south.  This storm was then transformed into a cyprus low pressure area as cold air was drawn southward around high pressure centred over central Europe, bringing more rain, which ended in a period of snow.

By the way, the most likely reason it didn't snow more is because of the difference between an occluded low pressure area and a developing low pressure area.  I will try to touch more on this later.

Looking ahead, we see that more winter-like temperatures will be mixed with our springtime sunshine.  In fact, we're looking at a possible end of the month rain storm, and even more winter like weather as well (consistent with a previous blog mentioning a more winter like signal among the ensemble members).  How rainy or how cold? It's not yet clear, but conditions are favourable for a late winter spell.

As I've mentioned, Israel is a mixture of different cultures, and there are definite advantages to this.  One disadvantage, though, is eating food with a spice called Tumeric.  It always seems to get on my clothes, but rarely on those of my wife (who is a native Israeli, with parents are from a middle eastern culture who thrive on it).  The problem is that it is very hard to get out, but is bright yellow, so everyone knows what you've been eating, or at least everyone wonders what you've been eating.  Fortunately, I found that Tide detergent will get it out, and no longer wash my clothes several time, intermixed with a doses of lemon juice and vinegar, and a bit of sunshine.

On a final note. I mixed good old Stony Field farm yogurt with an Israeli children's yogurt, and I got a very good batch of yogurt.  Apparently, these different bacteria from different parts of the world thrive together, and in this case a mixture is a very good thing.

Barry Lynn