Stormy weather

Regular lines of showers and thundershowers are bursting across San Diego County today. It started just before 3 this morning with lightning flashes that were white through closed eyes.

I got up to hush puppies – they hate thunder – but also to watch. I love weather. One of the most beautiful places on earth is a Texas country road about five miles ahead of a line of thunderstorms.

San Diego County doesn’t have thunderstorms the way Texas has thunderstorms, and certainly not as often. If we get three episodes of thunder a year, it starts deserving mention of going into the record books. The thunder that began just before 3 this morning was over by 3:10.

At least two of the storm lines after sunrise have brought more thunder, so we are looking at record books here. This is a very cold storm, with snow levels down to 1,500 feet (Texans don’t know what a snow level is) and a couple of times our house has been peppered with granular showers of hail. It is a big storm, too, riding a powerful and persistent jet stream, and I hope it lasts through tomorrow.

But I know it won’t. Tomorrow will be partly cloudy with residual showers in the forecast, but it won’t rain.

I love weather for the drama. That is why I miss my native Texas storms so. Other people like weather for their own reasons. They must like it, because it is one of the few events in our lives that never misses a day in the media. Even big, important newspapers give a half-page or more to the weather every day, and local television news productions have devoted half an hour or more of air time to the weather before the day is out.

I think the appeal is change. People like change, or the threat of change. Change, or the threat of change, in fact are the core definition of news, that evolved in the minds of humans long before the media, and what we call “news,” came into existence. On most of the world’s land mass, the inhabitants there can count on the weather to provide regular change, or the threat thereof. (In fact, weather is a bigger “threat” story than a “change” story. When weather happens, and it is big enough, it will make the news programs. But the weather forecast – the threat to change – gets its half page or half hour every day, no matter what.)

In San Diego, 85 percent of our weather forecasts read as follows: “Night and early morning low clouds or fog, otherwise sunny.” When the weather bureau talks about a cold storm and a powerful jet, weatherheads in this part of the world plan parties around it.

This has been such a day. The threat was great, and the change spectacular. And it isn’t over yet.