Fwd: Flooded with natural history & Duboce murals
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Thea Selby
Jan 29, 2013, 10:45:48 AM1/29/13
to lowerha...@googlegroups.com, Lisa Zahner
This is chock full of interesting info about our surroundings. Check out Alamo Square Springs--who knew? Enjoy!
--
Thea Selby
415 773 1841
th...@nextstepsmarketing.com
Thea
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joel at Thinkwalks
Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Subject: Flooded with natural history & Duboce murals
To: Thea <th...@nextstepsmarketing.com>
Amazing news! Fourteen years after creating the Bike Mural on Duboce Avenue, and 14 months after starting the 3rd edition of the self-guiding mural tour cards, I can finally offer you the quintessential take-home experience of the mural.
These hot-off-the-press 12-inch photo cards were created using completely new photos with much better color and detail. The text for the tour, on the backs of the cards, is fully updated. And the cover sheet I've created for these new mural cards includes the NEW SECRET at Duboce and Church that will change how you view the mural.
Not only that…this secret will leave you showing everyone you know. This is something that can only be seen when you are at that corner, in the exact right secret spot and the perfect angle. That's how exciting it is. Special thanks to artist Mona Caron for everything she's done at Church & Duboce over the years!
You can order your set of the new mural cards at thinkwalks.org/store or get one on your next Thinkwalks tour. If you live in SF, I will hand deliver the cards by bicycle.
Except if I'm outta town.
Which I will be Feb 1 to 22.
So get your order in quick! And if I'm not too inundated, I'll bring it by before I head out. The cards are a foot long each and there are seven. They can be put together end-to-end to create this award-winning transportation history and local natural history mural in your office or home…SEVEN FEET LONG.
There are a goodly number of tours now on the thinkwalks.org/calendar page for you to sign up to take, too. Remember, it's always pay-what-you-want at Thinkwalks tours.
Important news:
Alamo Square is slated for a completely new irrigation system at a cost of 2.3 million bucks. In order to get questions answered about how much water is really needed for irrigation from the city water mains, we must take this opportunity to ask where the park's many springs are. The final project approval hearing will be in April. I'm trying to learn what I can about the community outreach that invites your participation, but where, when and how?
Feel free to put a word in with Steve Cismowski, Area Manager; Tom O’Conner, Alamo Square Manager; and Marvin Yee, of Capital Projects at the Recreation and Parks Department.
They need to become aware that we are interested in celebrating and utilizing the springs and groundwater that make Alamo Square special.
Many people seem to believe that the damp areas are merely artifacts of the broken old irrigation lines, but there is much evidence for multiple and copious springs. That evidence needs to be explored, not ignored, as seems to have been done at Lafayette Park during that park's water installation. Areas with springs at Lafayette continued to gush and erode after project completion, simply because the Rec & Park folks aren't looking to the springs that abound in SF hills as features. Apparently they either fail to see them at all, or see them as bugs, so to speak. I may be wrong, but so far it looks like they are not eager to acknowledge the springs at all, let alone as a resource.
Now for your monthly Deep SF Facts:
You may have heard recently (since it was the 150 anniversary) a few mentions of the ARkStorm scenario, in which a storm like the 1861-62 deluge that hit the west coast might hit again. Few folks outside Sacramento even talk about that big historic storm.
Sacramento was flooded out entirely. It rained nine and a half feet just in January in higher elevations, which all flowed down to the Central Valley and engulfed Sac. It was the largest storm ever to hit North America in written history.
As noted in the last monthly email from Thinkwalks, there's some recently found geologic evidence of similar storms every 200 to 400 hundred years.
Scientific American currently has a feature on the storm scenario, based on something known as an 'atmospheric river.' That, too is a recently discovered concept. Low bands of heavy moisture flow invisibly like rivers from near the equator outward. Think about it: Water evaporates, and that's where rain and snow come from. But in colder climates, much less is evaporated. Yet storms in cold climates can be just as precipitous(!) as in the tropics. That equatorial evaporation must get toward the poles somehow, and this is how: the secret hidden rivers of moisture that only recent satellite systems have the correct filters to spot.
The 'AR' in 'ARkStorm' is for 'atmospheric river' but what is the 'k' for? Some articles say that the 'k' is for the 1,000 year historical window through which one must view the situation in order to see the pattern of the giant storms (tinyurl.com/ksjARkStorm). But no, they are mistaken. It turns out that the 1,000 in ARkStorm is not about time scale. In fact, it's almost the opposite: The 1,000 denotes a solution to the deep faults of time scale ratings.
The problem with frequency ratings is that extreme weather events are happening more often. The frequency is both increasing and becoming much more erratic. Studies of silt layers give clues that the past couple thousand years were much more frequency-predictable, so using that kind of scale made sense until recently. Sadly the meteorological future is expected to be a big mess. As a result, time-scale ratings have been essentially abandoned for serious predictive science.
The 1,000 actually stands for the new storm rating scale that the USGS hopes will come of their ARkStorm project, arbitrarily setting 1,000 at the level of what they believe the 1861-62 storm reached.
Developing this new scale is an ambitious task, and a very interesting one, since it requires formulating a single metric, one that expresses everything from extent, duration and severity of the storm to destructive capacity, temperature fluctuation, wind and precipitation, among other factors. The hardest part is comparing storms that are measurably similar in one way--such as wind or rain--at a given location but very different at another location.
One of the most impressive things about 1861-62 was the area that storm covered (from Washington to Southern California and well inland) delivering severe conditions. Should a storm that hits a narrower area but has more hail, for instance, be rated less, more or the same? The USGS team has a daunting standardization task ahead.
Until three years ago, I was one of a very small number researching this from the natural history perspective. Now there's much evidence of active research, though most is centered around the immeasurably giant task of hazard mitigation (to say nothing of the survivalist "preppers").
My interest, as you probably can guess, is general education about climate and historical geography. Between all the efforts going on, the portion of Thinkwalks tour-goers who have heard of these storms has increased from near zero to about three percent.
And now, since you read this far, you are one of the elite few who know lots about it!
See you at a Thinkwalk soon!
Joel
PS: Please do sign up for new walks & hikes at thinkwalks.org/calendar!
--
Joel Pomerantz, Thinkwalks researcher & guide
415-505-8255
thinkwalks.org
facebook.com/thinkwalks
iPhone apps: (not tours, just deep SF info spread out over the city for you and your pals to discuss & discover)
1) Everything Explained
bit.ly/EverythingExplainedApp
2) Local Nerd!
bit.ly/LocalNerdApp
Don't forget to email a friend about your fun Thinkwalks tour!
Don't forget to review Thinkwalks on Yelp!
Don't forget to review the iPhone app after you use it!
Don't forget to order your hot-off-the-press Duboce bike mural card set/self-guided tour
============================================================================================
Forward this email to a friend:
http://us4.forward-to-friend2.com/forward?u=09bffa1e07ba337354698cc3d&id=55bf43ed8c&e=6a1d8a0081
Unsubscribe th...@nextstepsmarketing.com from this list:
http://thinkwalks.us4.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=09bffa1e07ba337354698cc3d&id=1bb866065a&e=6a1d8a0081&c=55bf43ed8c
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Joel at Thinkwalks
Date: Tuesday, January 29, 2013
Subject: Flooded with natural history & Duboce murals
To: Thea <th...@nextstepsmarketing.com>
Amazing news! Fourteen years after creating the Bike Mural on Duboce Avenue, and 14 months after starting the 3rd edition of the self-guiding mural tour cards, I can finally offer you the quintessential take-home experience of the mural.
These hot-off-the-press 12-inch photo cards were created using completely new photos with much better color and detail. The text for the tour, on the backs of the cards, is fully updated. And the cover sheet I've created for these new mural cards includes the NEW SECRET at Duboce and Church that will change how you view the mural.
Not only that…this secret will leave you showing everyone you know. This is something that can only be seen when you are at that corner, in the exact right secret spot and the perfect angle. That's how exciting it is. Special thanks to artist Mona Caron for everything she's done at Church & Duboce over the years!
You can order your set of the new mural cards at thinkwalks.org/store or get one on your next Thinkwalks tour. If you live in SF, I will hand deliver the cards by bicycle.
Except if I'm outta town.
Which I will be Feb 1 to 22.
So get your order in quick! And if I'm not too inundated, I'll bring it by before I head out. The cards are a foot long each and there are seven. They can be put together end-to-end to create this award-winning transportation history and local natural history mural in your office or home…SEVEN FEET LONG.
There are a goodly number of tours now on the thinkwalks.org/calendar page for you to sign up to take, too. Remember, it's always pay-what-you-want at Thinkwalks tours.
Important news:
Alamo Square is slated for a completely new irrigation system at a cost of 2.3 million bucks. In order to get questions answered about how much water is really needed for irrigation from the city water mains, we must take this opportunity to ask where the park's many springs are. The final project approval hearing will be in April. I'm trying to learn what I can about the community outreach that invites your participation, but where, when and how?
Feel free to put a word in with Steve Cismowski, Area Manager; Tom O’Conner, Alamo Square Manager; and Marvin Yee, of Capital Projects at the Recreation and Parks Department.
They need to become aware that we are interested in celebrating and utilizing the springs and groundwater that make Alamo Square special.
Many people seem to believe that the damp areas are merely artifacts of the broken old irrigation lines, but there is much evidence for multiple and copious springs. That evidence needs to be explored, not ignored, as seems to have been done at Lafayette Park during that park's water installation. Areas with springs at Lafayette continued to gush and erode after project completion, simply because the Rec & Park folks aren't looking to the springs that abound in SF hills as features. Apparently they either fail to see them at all, or see them as bugs, so to speak. I may be wrong, but so far it looks like they are not eager to acknowledge the springs at all, let alone as a resource.
Now for your monthly Deep SF Facts:
You may have heard recently (since it was the 150 anniversary) a few mentions of the ARkStorm scenario, in which a storm like the 1861-62 deluge that hit the west coast might hit again. Few folks outside Sacramento even talk about that big historic storm.
Sacramento was flooded out entirely. It rained nine and a half feet just in January in higher elevations, which all flowed down to the Central Valley and engulfed Sac. It was the largest storm ever to hit North America in written history.
As noted in the last monthly email from Thinkwalks, there's some recently found geologic evidence of similar storms every 200 to 400 hundred years.
Scientific American currently has a feature on the storm scenario, based on something known as an 'atmospheric river.' That, too is a recently discovered concept. Low bands of heavy moisture flow invisibly like rivers from near the equator outward. Think about it: Water evaporates, and that's where rain and snow come from. But in colder climates, much less is evaporated. Yet storms in cold climates can be just as precipitous(!) as in the tropics. That equatorial evaporation must get toward the poles somehow, and this is how: the secret hidden rivers of moisture that only recent satellite systems have the correct filters to spot.
The 'AR' in 'ARkStorm' is for 'atmospheric river' but what is the 'k' for? Some articles say that the 'k' is for the 1,000 year historical window through which one must view the situation in order to see the pattern of the giant storms (tinyurl.com/ksjARkStorm). But no, they are mistaken. It turns out that the 1,000 in ARkStorm is not about time scale. In fact, it's almost the opposite: The 1,000 denotes a solution to the deep faults of time scale ratings.
The problem with frequency ratings is that extreme weather events are happening more often. The frequency is both increasing and becoming much more erratic. Studies of silt layers give clues that the past couple thousand years were much more frequency-predictable, so using that kind of scale made sense until recently. Sadly the meteorological future is expected to be a big mess. As a result, time-scale ratings have been essentially abandoned for serious predictive science.
The 1,000 actually stands for the new storm rating scale that the USGS hopes will come of their ARkStorm project, arbitrarily setting 1,000 at the level of what they believe the 1861-62 storm reached.
Developing this new scale is an ambitious task, and a very interesting one, since it requires formulating a single metric, one that expresses everything from extent, duration and severity of the storm to destructive capacity, temperature fluctuation, wind and precipitation, among other factors. The hardest part is comparing storms that are measurably similar in one way--such as wind or rain--at a given location but very different at another location.
One of the most impressive things about 1861-62 was the area that storm covered (from Washington to Southern California and well inland) delivering severe conditions. Should a storm that hits a narrower area but has more hail, for instance, be rated less, more or the same? The USGS team has a daunting standardization task ahead.
Until three years ago, I was one of a very small number researching this from the natural history perspective. Now there's much evidence of active research, though most is centered around the immeasurably giant task of hazard mitigation (to say nothing of the survivalist "preppers").
My interest, as you probably can guess, is general education about climate and historical geography. Between all the efforts going on, the portion of Thinkwalks tour-goers who have heard of these storms has increased from near zero to about three percent.
And now, since you read this far, you are one of the elite few who know lots about it!
See you at a Thinkwalk soon!
Joel
PS: Please do sign up for new walks & hikes at thinkwalks.org/calendar!
--
Joel Pomerantz, Thinkwalks researcher & guide
415-505-8255
thinkwalks.org
facebook.com/thinkwalks
iPhone apps: (not tours, just deep SF info spread out over the city for you and your pals to discuss & discover)
1) Everything Explained
bit.ly/EverythingExplainedApp
2) Local Nerd!
bit.ly/LocalNerdApp
Don't forget to email a friend about your fun Thinkwalks tour!
Don't forget to review Thinkwalks on Yelp!
Don't forget to review the iPhone app after you use it!
Don't forget to order your hot-off-the-press Duboce bike mural card set/self-guided tour
============================================================================================
Forward this email to a friend:
http://us4.forward-to-friend2.com/forward?u=09bffa1e07ba337354698cc3d&id=55bf43ed8c&e=6a1d8a0081
Unsubscribe th...@nextstepsmarketing.com from this list:
http://thinkwalks.us4.list-manage2.com/unsubscribe?u=09bffa1e07ba337354698cc3d&id=1bb866065a&e=6a1d8a0081&c=55bf43ed8c
--
Thea Selby
415 773 1841
th...@nextstepsmarketing.com
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