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By Tina Fisher Cunningham
Fisher Forde Media 

Turbines in the snow

The Forde Files No 138

 

Tina Fisher Cunningham

Two snowstorms blanketed the Tehachapi area like holiday bookends a week apart at the tail-end of 2016 -- one starting just before Christmas Eve morning and one on New Year's night, ushering in both festive days on a palette of dazzling white. Rather than being light and dry and forming a winter-long base, the Tehachapi area snow typically is wet and, in the absence of sustained freezing temperatures, melts quickly. According to the weather web site Mountainbase.com, located at Oak Knolls in Golden Hills, the lowest temperature for the month of December, 2016, was 26.8 degrees Farhenheit at 3:30 a.m. on Christmas morning. New Years day checked in at 30.2 degrees at 3:00 a.m. Warmer bright sunny days followed both snowstorms. When lower temperatures and high winds accompany the snow, the weather can be harsh-- but it's been a few years since the CHP closed Hwy. 58 due to such icy conditions that their own vehicles were blown across across the road. Conditions at the higher elevations -- up to 7,000 feet at Bear Valley -- are more severe than at the 4,000-foot valley floors. Snow and rain ultimately replenish the groundwater basins that provide much of the water for the Tehachapi valleys. Other water arrives in Tehachapi via pipeline from the State Water Project canal in the Central Valley that carries water from the melting snowpack in the high Sierras of northern California. Above, the wind farms on the rolling hills of the eastern Tehachapi Mountains, elevation approximately 4,500 -4,700 feet, on Jan. 1, 2017. In the new year, snow has given way to welcome rain, and there is more to come.

Tina Fisher Cunningham

 
 

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