Day: August 25, 2020

Walbridge Fire

There are almost no evacuation warning areas left. What remains are some residual fires and some mandatory evacuation zones and one evacuation warning zone (figure 1).

Fig. 1. Screenshot of Sonoma County Fire Incident Map taken by author on August 25, 2020 at 9:58 pm EDT (6:58 pm PDT).

Barring adverse developments, I’ll probably stop paying attention here.

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Tropical Storms

Fig. 2. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for the eastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico, as of August 25, 2020, 10:01 pm EDT.

It’s still a bit ambiguous to my eye, but Laura appears to possibly be on a more westerly track than the one followed by Marco (figure 2). My guess would now be landfall in Louisiana or Mississippi. I’m expecting a better idea tomorrow, yeah, probably just as the storm actually is making landfall.

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Pandemic

This probably isn’t another hydroxychloroquine. It looks like blood plasma therapy might be effective for some COVID-19 patients. We don’t know how many. We don’t know how often. But it probably isn’t 35 percent of patients.^[1]

“For the first time ever, I feel like official people in communications and people at the F.D.A. grossly misrepresented data about a therapy,” said Dr. Walid Gellad, who leads the Center for Pharmaceutical Policy and Prescribing at the University of Pittsburgh.^[2]

Katie Thomas and Sheri Fink, “F.D.A. ‘Grossly Misrepresented’ Blood Plasma Data, Scientists Say,” New York Times, August 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/health/fda-blood-plasma.html

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Police

There is a new blog post entitled, “Don’t just defund the police. Abolish them.”

Stephen Maturen, “Wisconsin calls out National Guard after unrest over police shooting of Black man,” Reuters, August 24, 2020, https://uk.reuters.com/article/uk-global-race-usa-wisconsin/wisconsin-calls-out-national-guard-after-unrest-over-police-shooting-of-black-man-idUKKBN25K0CP

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Walbridge Fire

At this point, it’s very much looking to me like residual smoke, rather than fire itself, is the principle concern here. Though there have been no further downgrades of evacuation zones since 6:00 pm EDT (3:00 pm PDT) yesterday, the number of active fires seems to be diminishing (figure 1).

Fig. 1. Screenshot of Sonoma County Fire Incident Map taken by author, August 25, 2020, at 8:04 am EDT (5:04 am PDT).

The threat of lightning^[3] should also be diminishing as that low pressure area, now roughly west of Monterey, is looking pretty weak (figure 2), but I would be cautious about this for at least one more day.

Fig. 2. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for the western U.S.

Tropical storms

Marco is gone, its remnants appear over the Atlantic; Laura is entering the Gulf of Mexico and looks to me likely to follow roughly the same track as Marco, hitting the Florida panhandle (figure 3).

Fig. 3. 72-hour gif of satellite imagery for the eastern U.S. and Gulf of Mexico

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1. ^[1]Katie Thomas and Sheri Fink, “F.D.A. ‘Grossly Misrepresented’ Blood Plasma Data, Scientists Say,” New York Times, August 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/health/fda-blood-plasma.html↩
2. ^[2]Katie Thomas and Sheri Fink, “F.D.A. ‘Grossly Misrepresented’ Blood Plasma Data, Scientists Say,” New York Times, August 24, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/24/health/fda-blood-plasma.html↩
3. ^[3]Michael McGough, “More weekend thunder, lightning in Northern California forecasts stoke wildfire concerns,” Sacramento Bee, August 21, 2020, https://www.sacbee.com/news/weather-news/article245139635.html↩