Darkness falls

Darkness falls upon us, in more than one way.

This time, minutes before a sudden, and fortunately short, rain shower. Fortunately because I was having lunch without any umbrella at hand. It rained, finally. I cannot remember when was the last time. And it has been good on the temperature too.

Anyway, the news is that a tropical storm is getting closer. More or less, the first one this year. It is not a typhoon yet and it is supposed to go to the Philippines. But you cannot trust these beasts, you never know how large they will become or where they will end up landing.

November sky

The weather is colder and we had a day between sunny and some clouds. Another failed try on the personal side, but I expected it. A real pity.

The sunset, though, was spectacular. Really worth anything.

Wet

Today, a friend sent me this spectacular image of the state of the tropical storms on this side of the world.

On the West side of the map, there is the tropical storm Parma, which has more less taken a seat near the coast of the Philippines and it is moving very slowly. The forecasts say that it should be travelling in a SW-S direction, doing more harm to the poor Philippines I guess, and moving away from Taiwan. But while it remains where it is, we already had two days of non-stop rain; strong now, weak later, with some strong wind coming and going, and it seems that this will not change until Wednesday.

The other storm towards the East side of the map is the supertyphoon Melor, kind of scary seen in this way, which should be moving towards the North in the direction of Japan and would never reach us, but we will see.

In short, we will not have a drought here, but a lot of clothes and shoes to dry.

Accumulated rain

A spectacular image obtained by NASA's satellite TRMM showing the rainfall originated by the Morakot typhoon de la NASA from August 3 to 10. Impressive.

Hot

Month of July in Taipei. As you can imagine, it is very warm. We have been over 36ºC today, according to the temperatures on some websites, very humid and with a burning Sun, even if there were some diffuse clouds overhead. The funny image, that I have not been able to save because I did not have my camera with me, was five or six scooters waiting for the traffic light to turn not just at the line, as they usually do, but 10 or 15 meters behind it, under the shadow of a footbridge, all very close to each other to better avoid the Sun. Special people!.

As for me, maybe recklessly, I went out jogging along the river this evening for while. I felt rather well again, better than last Saturday, but it looked as if I sweated my soul out. I was literally dripping, so much that I left a trail on the tiles at home .

Maybe tonight, when I get home, I will take a third shower. Summer.

After the rain

We finally had a thunderstorm this afternoon. It did not last long and it did not carry too much rain, but it is the first storm that I can remember recently. From my window, I could see the dark sky towards the South and the lightning criss-crossing between the clouds. It is very strange how dry is the weather on these last few weeks. The best thing was the sky after the rain.

Summer

It has not yet arrived astronomically, and I know that it will only increase, but after two or three similar days, I declare, according to the parameters I am used to, that Summer has already started. We had another sunny day today —from the little I have seen, because I woke up very late—, hot and, as it felt to me, not so humid as we are used to. It was one of those days of mid-to-late summer in Catalonia, when the first thing you want to do is go to the beach.

The funny thing is that the rainy season is supposed to start now. I think we have some big storms waiting for us, to compensate for this nice weather.

Flowers

Since I arrived to Taiwan, I can tell how the weather changes as the months go by and you can probably say that there are seasons; but the differences are not so large as in other latitudes. A couple of weeks ago, I realized that spring was here. Leaves are sprouting again on many of the trees that had lost them and there are many flowers, preferentially white, pink or a pale red on the campus gardens.

And while they last, they smell really good.

PS: The name of the flowers in the picture is dù juān: indian azalea.

Fog

The buildings fade away; the mountains?, nowhere to be found. Fog covers everything.

Can you find the Taipei 101?

I cannot. Taipei, yesterday afternoon.

Ring of clouds

These last few days, specially in the afternoon, the Taipei basin is covered by clouds that can reduce a lot visibility and make invisible the mountains around the city and some not-so-distant buildings. Today, I could see how the clouds assaulted the Taipei 101 building.

Or began rolling down the slopes of the hills, looking a lot like what some 10000 km away is known as la peluda (freely translated as the "hairy one")

but this one does not carry so much cold with it.

Typhoon tracking

Some links today. The typhoon season has not started yet, at least in Taiwan. There are two or three months left until it does, but this does not mean that there are not any tropical storms somewhere and that we cannot track them. There are several websites that provide (more or less) real time information about the active storm or storms, or where you can see how the previous ones were. Besides, there is also, ready to use, the list of names that will be used on the new storms, what country gives the name and things like that. Last year, I mainly used three of them:

• the typhoon webpage of the Japan Meteorological Agency
  
• wikipedia pages: this year's new one 2009 and last year's (2008)
  
• typhoon2000: a webpage from the Philippines with pictures and real time information, when there is a storm going on
  

Using these three webpages, at least, it is easy to follow the evolution of the storm, see what is approaching, and decide then if you want to leave your nice little apartment or not.

Dragging the cold

I could see how it snowed in the Poble Nou and Ciutat Vella the last night before leaving Barcelona. It was not a big one, maybe more ice than snow, but enough to be counted as such. The temperature was very low for Barcelona.

It may not seem so, but there are also low temperatures in Taiwan in the winter, but until yesterday, every time I looked in the web what was the weather like, the maximum temperatures every day were from 18º to 20º C, and the minimum temperatures around 15ºC. Today, the maximum temperature was close to 15ºC and the forecast for tomorrow is below that, with a minimum of 8ºC. It may not feel that cold for some more hardened spirits, but it is extremely cold for the locals. It looks like I took some cold with me in my luggage (nobody would have said that in the hour or so I spent in the Bangkok airport).

Anyway, there is the Year's End party of the ASIAA tomorrow, and I will be able to use the coat I brought from Barcelona. Now I need to buy a blanket for my bed.

Autumn

Of course, I had been told that fall in Taipei was very nice. Now that winter is coming, at least the astronomical winter, I can confirm it. That does not mean that we did not have grey or rainy or cloudy days, some not very pleasant, or that we did not suffered sudden drops in temperatures, but it has been almost a week with clear blue skies and a very nice Sun. It was a little bit chillier towards the end of last week, but this one is almost perfect. A few real fall days, even if it is already December.

As for me, I really like these mornings when I walk to work and I can gaze at those clear skies and see how the light slips through the green trees. I could even smell the just-cut grass in front of my office this morning.

No news, I know, it reminds me of those very cold days in Columbus, when maybe all was covered in white because of the snow, the river was frozen, but there was that nice Sun that, at least, brought some warmth to your heart. Small daily joys.

And this afternoon, to Hsinchu, going to the ALMA-jT workshop, with my half-finished presentation. The forecast for tomorrow and the weekend says it will be colder. We'll see.

Change in the Weather

After two days of almost non-stopping rain, the weather front that is crossing over us has brought lower temperatures. Today it was still cloudy, but it rained little, and we have been hovering around 20 degrees, almost 10 degrees less than last week. I cannot remember when was the last time I experienced such low temperatures. Maybe since last June, when I was in the Alishan mountains. I was missing a little bit having colder weather. Of course these last weeks were almost perfect in good weather and temperature. We are not so close to the tropics for nothing.

I do not think that it will last long, because the forecast is for better weather on Wednesday. As soon as the Sun turns up, the cold ends. But, looking at people on the streets today, it seemed as if it was much much colder. Some had many clothes on. I am at that point were short sleeves are still comfortable, but you'd better have some shirt to put on if it gets colder in the evening. Definetly, my stay in America changed my thermostat.