Japanese Meteorological Corporation Cherry Blossom Forecasts for 2018

 From a report on the starting of the Tokyo cherry blossom season on March 21, 2017:

                    Although the JMA still officially declares the start of cherry blossom blooming, it stopped its forecasts in 2010, due in part to the increased accuracy of the private companies.

                 One of those companies, Tokyo-based Weather Map Co., has updated its forecasts twice a week in March, based on an analysis of the official somei-yoshino cherry trees used by the JMA at 53 locations around Japan.

 

 

Charles Darwin and earlier observers noticed "red water"

 March 18th. — We sailed from Bahia. A few days afterwards, when not far distant from the Abrolhos Islets, my attention was called to a reddish-brown appearance in the sea. The whole surface of the water, as it appeared under a weak lens, seemed as if covered by chopped bits of hay, with their ends jagged.
—Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the Beagle

 He credited a number of observers with earlier reports.  In his notes he mentions:

M. Lesson (Voyage de la Coquille, tom. i., p. 255) mentions red water off Lima, apparently produced by the same cause. Peron, the distinguished naturalist, in the Voyage aux Terres Australes, gives no less than twelve references to voyagers who have alluded to the discoloured waters of the sea (vol. ii. p. 239). To the references given by Peron may be added, Humboldt's Pers. Narr., vol. vi. p. 804; Flinder's Voyage, vol. i. p. 92; Labillardiere, vol. i. p. 287; Ulloa's Voyage; Voyage of the Astrolabe and of the Coquille; Captain King's Survey of Australia, etc.

In January 1915,  "Sea Sawdust" was reported by Earth Observatory:

Another image from Landsat 8, taken on 11 September 2017 is featured here:

From that site:

The blooms are likely to be Trichodesmium spp., a microscopic, photosynthetic cyanobacteria that aggregates into long strands on the sea surface. They are ubiquitous around the world, and they tend to bloom off the coast of Queensland between August and December as the water warms. Some evidence suggests that Trichodesmium blooms here are happening earlier and more often in recent years.

From a ship or the shoreline, these blooms look like dirty brown or green stripes on the water and like an oil slick when they hit the beach. Such blooms off the Australian coast were reported two centuries ago by Captain James Cook and by Charles Darwin.

Up Close and In Person 

It was not possible to easily link the following site, with photos of Trichodesmium sp.  

 See the University of New Hampshire Phycokey.  

Behavior of Tides of San Francisco Bay

I'm not going to not write much about these graphs.  I had assumed that as one moves into the Bay, tide range would be attenuated.  So I was surprized to read the following bit from An Introduction to the San Francisco Estuary by Andrew Cohen and Jack Laws:

In the northern reach the tidal range (the difference in height between high water and low water) drops with distance from the ocean, from a mean range of about five-and-a-half feet at the Golden Gate to only three feet at Sacramento.    In contrast, in the southern reach’s more enclosed basin the tides cause the water to slosh back and forth like water in a bathtub, amplifying the range at the southern end to eight-and-one-half feet.

I wanted to explore this, so I graphed several sites in the Northern Reach, and five in the Southern Reach.  These are a work in progress.

The predictions that are graphed here are from Xtide: www.flaterco.com



In the legend, stations are listed  in order from the Entrance  to the most distant. 

"San Francisco" is the Fort Point station.