Our evening male anchor is Gino LaMont. He is the KMIR sage, in the market long enough to know most answers.
“Gino, have you heard of a place called Cactus City,” I asked during a commercial break? He had not. I decided not to mention it.
Wikipedia says it’s an unincorporated community. I’m not sure anyone lives in Cactus City anymore. It was founded in 1935. It’s got a rest area on I-10 named after it. 99 in Cactus City today.
It might not have people, but Cactus City’s got a weather station. It’s in the California Hydro group. As far as I can tell it was America’s hot spot today.
There’s a weather station in Dos Palmas, near Mecca. I don’t think anyone lives there either. They hit 98.
Lots of people tried to settle this part of the west before good roads and air conditioning. Settlements came and went.
Bermuda Dunes made it to 97 this afternoon. People live in Bermuda Dunes. It even has an airport. That’s not where we get the weather. The weather in Bermuda Dunes comes from the Union Pacific Railroad.
The amount of localized weather data available today is crazy. The Internet allows nearly any hobbyist or business to help out. These reading are assimilated into the system. Knowing the weather in Cactus City is part of my job.
When I lived in Huntsville, Alabama, we did SKYWARN on Ham Radio. We had a list of over 250 very small towns across the top of the state.
Many of them only had a convenience store, maybe a single church, and a few houses tucked away in the woods. Many times GOOGLE maps had trouble finding them. I doubt GPS does any better nowadays.
We had to know this because many times a Ham would report weather or funnel clouds from one of those towns and only have the capability to ID the town. Nowadays with APRS we do a lot better…but there are still tons of places that are just barely places on the map.
They do seem to have a weather station almost everywhere in the USA today. Although (I think) the NWS has certain standards that they use for data collection (like instrument height) that sometimes these remote stations not as useful for research.
Still, I think this is the fun part of weather. One place always thought needed a true NWS reporting station was Dry Tortugas, Florida. Almost 70 miles (113 km) west of Key West lies the remote Dry Tortugas National Park. The 100-square mile park is mostly open water with seven small tropical islands. Supposedly this is the warmest location in the lower 48.
The amount of localized weather data available today is crazy