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- Written by: Elizabeth Larson
The agency has issued a hazardous weather outlook for Lake County and other parts of northeastern Northern California that’s in effect through the middle of next week due to a warming trend expected to begin this weekend.
The forecast calls for winds of up to 10 miles per hour over the next several days, with afternoon
high temperatures eventually climbing into the 90s starting on Monday.
The Lake County forecast calls for temperatures ranging into the high 80s over the weekend and into the low 90s on Monday, rising into the high 90s in the south county through Thursday.
Conditions are anticipated to be mostly clear and sunny, with partly cloudy skies on Thursday night before clearing again on Friday, forecasters said.
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
The State Water Project now expects to deliver 20 percent of requested supplies in 2020 thanks to above-average precipitation in May, the California Department of Water Resources announced Friday.
An initial allocation of 10 percent was announced in December and increased to 15 percent in January.
Friday’s announcement will likely be the final allocation update of 2020.
“May storms gave us a boost following a very dry winter and allowed us to increase allocations for communities and agriculture in California,” said DWR Director Karla Nemeth. “It’s another example of our state’s unpredictable precipitation that has been compounded by our changing climate. We must manage our water supply responsibly to not only deliver water now but ensure we have enough in reserves to protect us from future dry years.”
Water from Clear Lake makes its way to the bay delta, which in turn helps source the State Water Project.
Following below-average precipitation most of the winter, May storms delivered 181 percent of average in the Northern Sierra for this time of year.
This year’s snowpack is the 11th driest on record since 1950 while precipitation stands as the 7th driest on record since 1977. Thirty percent of California’s annual water supply comes from snowpack.
A 20 percent allocation amounts to 843,696 acre-feet of water. The SWP provides water to 29 SWP contractors who supply water to more than 27 million Californians and 750,000 acres of farmland.
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- Written by: Sarah Frazier
The Solar and Heliospheric Observatory, a joint mission between the European Space Agency and NASA, was not designed to find comets — its original goal was to study the Sun from its deep core to the outer layers of its atmosphere.
But building new observatories can thankfully bring in discoveries that are entirely unexpected.
Nearly 25 years since its launch, data from this space-based solar observatory has led to the discovery of well over half of all known comets — upwards of 3,950 new comets found.
Though the SOHO team anticipated the spacecraft would discover some new comets, they never expected to find nearly 4,000 of them.
The huge number of SOHO-discovered comets comes thanks to a combination of well-designed instruments, a long lifespan, the hard work of citizen scientists and a little bit of luck.
"SOHO is uniquely placed in space and uniquely designed, and it’s these aspects of the spacecraft that allow it to see and discover so many comets," said Karl Battams, a space scientist at the Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C.
SOHO carries an instrument called a coronagraph that uses a solid disk to block out the Sun's bright face, revealing the much fainter outer atmosphere, the corona. Scientists use these images of the corona to study how this part of the atmosphere changes and to track occasional explosions of material from the Sun, called coronal mass ejections.
SOHO's vantage point between the Sun and Earth, about a million miles from Earth, gives it a constant view of the Sun's atmosphere.
SOHO's coronagraph, known as LASCO, has both high sensitivity and a wide field of view, which turns out to be perfectly suited to see so-called “sungrazing comets” that fly too close to the Sun's overwhelmingly bright face to be seen from Earth or with most other scientific instruments.
And because SOHO has kept a steady eye on the corona – through which these comets fly — almost continuously for nearly 25 years, its data has revealed thousands of previously unknown comets: 3,953 as of May 2020.
Almost all of SOHO's comet discoveries have come from its coronagraph data, but a small handful of comets have been discovered in images from a different instrument on board: the SWAN instrument, a camera designed to look for interactions between the solar wind and hydrogen atoms in space.
Some comets, including Comet SWAN discovered in April 2020, outgas large amounts of water — of which hydrogen is the main component — as they approach the Sun, making them visible to SWAN.
Around 85 percent of the thousands of comets discovered by SOHO are members of one family of comets: the Kreutz group.
The Kreutz sungrazers are thought to be the remnants of a single giant comet, which, some thousands of years ago, flew close to the Sun and heated up, loosening the ice that bound it together. It fragmented into thousands of tiny comets that we know today as the Kreutz family. These relatively tiny remnants — most are around the size of a house — follow the path of the original Kreutz comet.
SOHO's data has proven a prime hunting ground for previously-undiscovered comets, but that doesn't mean the going is easy. Most of the discoveries have been made through the painstaking work of citizen scientists with the Sungrazer Project, a NASA-funded project managed by Battams that grew out of early citizen science comet discoveries not long after SOHO launched in 1995.
"After word spread that scientists were seeing new comets in the SOHO data, people went to the SOHO website and downloaded the images themselves and found a bunch of comets that the scientists had missed," said Battams. "It got to the point where the project team was overwhelmed with the number of reports, so they created the Sungrazer Project to act as the hub for these discoveries."
If the rate of new comet discoveries continues at its usual pace, SOHO's 4,000th new comet will likely be spotted sometime in summer 2020, according to Battams.
The comets discovered in SOHO's data have given scientists valuable insight into both comets as a whole as well as the environment they fly through.
Because they fly so close to our star, most of the comets seen by SOHO don't survive their trip around the Sun — they disintegrate near their closest approach because of the incredible heating caused by the intense sunlight.
"When SOHO sees a comet, nearly every single one of them is in the process of being destroyed," said Battams. "In that way, SOHO's data has given us a peek into the end of life of a comet."
Beyond that, the comets spotted by SOHO can also act as celestial windsocks, revealing new information about the solar wind and solar atmosphere that they fly through.
As comets approach the Sun, they become enveloped in a tail of gases liberated from the comet by heating caused by the intense sunlight. Some of the gases in this bright tail are ionized and are buffeted by the magnetized solar wind and magnetic fields in the Sun's outer atmosphere, giving scientists the opportunity to measure the conditions in this region that would otherwise be invisible from afar.
"We’ve used these images to validate models of the solar magnetic field and things like electron densities and temperatures," said Battams. "There’s all kinds of unique science you can do by watching these icy bodies travel through this extreme environment."
SOHO is a cooperative effort between ESA and NASA. Mission control is based at NASA Goddard. SOHO’s Large Angle and Spectrometric Coronagraph Experiment, or LASCO, which is the instrument that provides most of the comet imagery, was built by an international consortium, led by the U.S. Naval Research Lab in Washington, D.C.
Sarah Frazier works from NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland.
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- Written by: Lake County News reports
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – The newest Lake County Teacher of the Year is a science teacher known for making the discipline accessible and practical for her students.
The Lake County Office of Education announced that Amanda Laughner, science teacher at Upper Lake High School, is this year’s Lake County Teacher of the Year.
“She is the absolute real deal when it comes to teaching,” said Annie Pivinski Petrie, principal of Upper Lake High School. “Our students trust and feel comfortable with Mrs. Laughner due to her genuine efforts on their behalf.”
Laughner is known for making her subject matter accessible to all students. “I build relationships within an engaging and inclusive science classroom environment. This involves students working together to “do” science, not just learn about science facts.”
Laughner added that she has high expectations of all her students, while knowing that they all aren’t starting at the same place.
“Through constantly encouraging students to share what they know and by acknowledging their growth, I help students recognize they are valuable resources in the learning process,” she said.
Her strength in teaching can be credited to her successful relationships with her own teachers.
“My teaching career was founded on the positive relationships I had with my own teachers. I viewed education as the path to achieve the life I wanted, and my excellent teachers believed that as well,” Laughner said.
Laughner has two master’s degrees, one in education and one in science in forestry and forest products.
This year, Laughner was called upon to support Upper Lake Middle School as it worked to increase curriculum and instruction capacity at their site.
She taught an advanced STEM enrichment course, piloting the course through a partnership with Sonoma State University.
“Her professionalism and commitment to this area of growth was a huge support and model for the staff,” Petrie said.
Laughner also acts as the club advisor for the Upper Lake High School Native American Club, and participates in the school district’s Native American Action Committee. Because she works directly with Native American students, her input to the committee provides valuable insight into their needs.
To add to her busy schedule, Laughner was asked to lead Upper Lake High School’s implementation of a comprehensive Multi-Tiered System of Support, an approach to improving students’ academic, behavioral and social success.
Laughner will design and pilot a new course for students who have not been successful in the regular classroom. She will also help support teachers to embed tier one steps as an active, frequent and ongoing part of their classrooms.
After being selected as district teachers of the year through their site administrators, four Lake County District Teachers of the Year competed through an application and interview process for the distinction of Lake County Teacher.
They are:
– Matt Carpenter, Kelseyville Unified School District;
– Jan Peterson, Konocti Unified School District;
– Jennifer Pyzer, Middletown Unified School District;
– Amanda Laughner, Upper Lake Unified School District.
There was a consensus among the selection committee that choosing just one Lake County Teacher of the Year was difficult, because the district teachers of the year brought so many strengths to the table.
Most notable was the 49 years of teaching that Jan Peterson has under her belt. Peterson is a second grade teacher at Lower Lake Elementary School, in the Konocti Unified School District.
“Jan has lived a life of service to the students in her classroom. Her quiet caring and willingness to go above and beyond was evident in our conversations,” said Deputy Superintendent of Schools Cynthia Lenners.
Besides the longevity of service that Peterson has provided to Lake County students, she is also considered an innovator in education.
She started a computer lab at Burns Valley Elementary School in 1985 with a grant from IBM. In 1991, she facilitated Math Wings, a research-based program out of John Hopkins University. In 2005, she piloted an interactive learning program using the Promethean Board. Today, Peterson is utilizing Google Classroom to provide distance learning to her students.
“Jan is always the first to implement new things,” said Tarin Benson, principal at Lower Lake Elementary School.
Members of the selection committee included Lake County Superintendent of Schools Brock Falkenberg; Deputy Superintendent of Schools Cynthia Lenners; Kerry Smith, current Lake County Teacher of the Year; Alan Siegel, former Lake County and California Teacher of the Year; and Jo Fay, representing the California Retired Teachers Association.
Lake County has had three California Teachers of the Year in the last 15 years. Erica Boomer from Upper Lake Unified School District was named a California Teacher of the Year 2019. Jennifer Kelly from the Middletown Unified School District received the honor in 2011, and Alan Siegel from Konocti Unified School District received the honor in 2005.
Falkenberg acknowledged the high success rate Lake County teachers have had in the California Teacher of the Year program.
“Our Lake County students are being served well by some of the best teachers in our state. That’s a very impressive thing,” he said.
Perhaps, Laughner will be added to that list.
The Lake County Teacher of the Year is a program administered through the Lake County Office of Education and the California Department of Education. For more information about the Lake County District Teachers of the Year, please visit www.lakecoe.org/TOY .