Indeed, while information provided by citizen observers continues to be essential for the daily forecast, historical data can be used to explore a future governed by changing climate. Because Santa Cruz’s weather observations were so geographically consistent for so long, Santa Cruz is an important location for studies of long-term climate variability. Santa Cruz observers tended to commit for many years, and many of them lived near one another. It’s also part of a trend in the history of Santa Cruz weather reporting. The length of Burton’s service represents more than just a single volunteer’s devotion to weather. The highest honor available to volunteer observers, the award is named for Thomas Jefferson’s own decades-long meteorology career. The Weather Bureau even awarded him the Thomas Jefferson Award, which denotes outstanding achievements in the field of meteorological observations. He reported weather observations from 1931 to 19 to 1976. In addition to his career as a high school science teacher, his collecting trips with dear friend and Museum donor Humphrey Pilkington, and his involvement in the Museum and Santa Cruz City Council, Burton was also the Santa Cruz weather station’s volunteer weather observer for over four decades. One person who contributed to both our understanding of Santa Cruz weather as well as the life of the Museum was early trustee Robert Burton.
We may observe the white caps a mile or so out, whilst standing on some high point, scarcely a couple of miles inland, we enjoy a very mild breeze.” Such is remarkably the case in the Santa Cruz Mountains. As a Santa Cruz Public Library board trustee in the early 1900s, he was instrumental in founding the “library museum” that first hosted Laura Hecox’s collection.Īnderson was struck by the interplay between winds at the border of land and sea: “When the wind blows down the coast,” he wrote in Elliott’s Illustrated History, “overlapping the land, and flowing over capes and promontories with a strong current, two or three miles inland the air is often calm and warm. On top of his day job as a medical doctor, Anderson found time to discover new plant species, became well known for his scientific publications on local natural history and even held public office. Charles Lewis Anderson, a local naturalist extraordinaire. For a more modern visualization, check out NASA’s Perpetual Ocean, which displays ocean current surface data from June 2005 to December 2007. This process, called upwelling, supports California’s rich coastal ecosystems. Simultaneously, land breezes push ocean surface waters away from the coast, which allows cooler, nutrient-filled water to rise up from ocean depths. The map depicts what we today refer to as the California Current: a large-scale current system that brings cool waters southward along the Pacific Coast. Ocean currents are driven by a mixture of wind, water density differences and tides.