Three depressions in the north eastern Pacific, and one in the Bering sea and one big active one off Russia

I've seen it before, but had lost the url, and it is an absolutely cool animation.

You can see that the low off Alaska is pulling warm wet air from around Hawaii toward the Pacific Northwest.

That is where the Calif storms have come from.

That said, even with that system pulling moisture from Hawaii, Calif is still dry.

We're at something like 50% of "normal" so far this year.

Much of the rain has run off, rather than being soaked in.

The warm systems haven't, to a great degree, been saved in the snow-pack, which is where most of Calif's water comes from.

http://cdec.water.ca.gov/cdecapp/snowapp...

Cool page, You can specify which years to look at.

What's happened for the last few years is that "pineapple express" has been more north, so that Canada, rather than Calif, got most of the moisture. Sure is nice that it's back, shipping precipitation to Calif.

BTW, you can use the cursor to move the world around, and the scroll dial to make it larger and smaller.

http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/win...

If you look directly at that south pole, the winds around Antarctica are the most dramatic.

http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/win...

If you look at the arctic, there isn't nearly as much wind.

Right now, there's an interesting front in the S. pacific.

If you were sailing, that'd be pretty exciting.

It'll change tomorrow, and even more next week.

I live in the Pacific Northwest and we get rain this time of year from all the freshwater melt down for 34 years on top of saltwater and that means evaporation and the winds take the rain clouds to the Northwest. That's why the Northwest is so green without forest fire's. Mike

Those are the surface winds. To get some feel for the water vapor, look at this image

http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mi...

This is an animation of the total precipitable water. Precipitable water is the liquid water equivalent to amount of water vapor above a point. If you look at California you'll see a narrow whitish-blue bands impinging on the coast of California then moving southward. Each of those has about 25 mm (1 inch) or more of precipitable water in them. The source of some of them is clearly in the tropics.

Of course the tropics is where most of the water vapor is. Notice that the precipitable water there stays perpetually high, 40 mm or more. The very highest values occur in tropical cyclones, when the precipitable water may get up to 75 mm. None of those are visible because it's the wrong time of year for tropical cyclones in the Eastern Pacific.

Here's the global picture:

http://tropic.ssec.wisc.edu/real-time/mi...

Pretty cool. It was probably obvious but you can move around the globe and zoom in as well.

Gee somehow folks don't understand that Climate is not equal to Weather.

Rain in any country to be followed by dry spell.

Thank you Kano. This will help me when I go out with my Southerly.