We often hear about meteorological records being broken. That is especially true for high temperatures, which is a symptom of global warming, and record rainfalls, which some argue is also symptomatic of global warming but which I would argue is simply the result of the oddity of the statistical distribution of precipitation…but that isn’t the point of this post. The point is that those of us in the central valley approached another type of all-time record this weekend without much fanfare . We approached the all-time high (atmospheric) pressure record at the Sacramento Airport this weekend. On Saturday at 9:53am PST, the sea-level pressure recorded was a whopping 1036.6 mb. That’s seriously high. The all-time January record is barely higher at 1037.6 mb. The difference between yesterday’s pressure and Earth’s standard pressure of 1013 mb is the same as the difference between the standard pressure on Earth and some tropical storms (but in the opposite direction)!
