Ticker for December 17, 2007

                
MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ... MESONET TICKER ...
December 17, 2007  December 17, 2007  December 17, 2007  December 17, 2007



It Was a Dark and Stormy Year ...

Sometimes, it's just valuable to tell people something very plain
that they already know. We, as a species, have long recognized and
celebrated anybody's ability to state the absurdly obvious. This
need of ours has produced important cultural material such as "The
Emperor's New Clothes", The "Elephant in The Room", and Howard Cosell.

Anyway, today's Ticker falls into that "duh" category.

It should come as no surprise that -- despite today's sunlight --
2007 is in a neck-and-neck run for the dimmest year of the Mesonet
era (since 1994). On average across the state, each one-meter-square
patch of earth has absorbed only 5645 mega-Joules of solar insolation.

Here's a graphic that shows how this ranks historically:


So, there you have it: it's been cloudy this year.

We feel pretty good about ourselves with this "state the obvious"
thing, so we're gonna try to stretch this base-hit into a double:

We at the Ticker think shag carpet was a bad idea.