The National Weather Service hasn't issued any expected precipitation totals for our area for the two upcoming storms. If they do, I'll post them.

Christmas Eve will be mostly clear and cold with a low of 33°F expected early Christmas Day. And Tuesday, Christmas Day will be partly cloudy with a high around 68°F. This weather pattern looks like it will be in place the rest of the week.

The approaching storm is estimated to cause 1/4" precipitation for coastal and inland areas such as the Temecula Valley, and 1/2" in the foothills. Snow levels are predicted to fall to 4000 feet Thursday night.

Today will be sunny with northeast winds possible once again and a high around 62°F. The winds should subside by this afternoon as the weak high pressure system moves east. Tonight and Monday morning will be mostly clear with frost possible and a low of 33°F. Monday will be mostly sunny with a high of 63°F. The next chance of rain is still predicted for Thursday.

The wireless rain gauge appears to have accurately recorded yesterday's rain. I've had to move it to be within ten feet of the receiver. The location is not the best, so I will probably go back to a wired rain gauge that I can place across the backyard sometime soon. The rainfall total which was nearly 1/3 of an inch was much more than expected.

TemeculaWeather.com was cited in a story in the Californian newspaper this morning about high winds and power outages in the Temecula area. The reporter seems to have used information directly from the web site. I was not contacted, I could have provided something more accurate than the hourly summary, which is currently a one hour sampling of winds and doesn't take gusts into account. For those that are interested, wind gusts Saturday morning reached a maximum of 35 miles per hour.

9:45 amEQUIPMENT FAILURE The weather station appears to be partially inoperative. The failure seems to have occurred sometime after 7 am this morning. I'm going to have to back out several errant weather records, and travel from my office in San Diego back to Temecula to attempt to figure out if I can get things working again. In the meantime, ignore the low; it did not get any colder than 45°F this morning. My apologies, this is the first failure of this type in the three years I've been using this equipment. More on this when I've diagnosed what's going on ...

3:45 pm End to end connectivity fixed and things are operating normally again. An electrical short in the older rain gauge wreaked havoc this morning and it took a while to get everything sorted out. There was no permananent damage to the equipment and things are working with the wireless rain gauge again, which I've temporarily deployed very close the receiver to hopefully ensure that all the rain is measured. All of the errant data has been removed. A lot of today's rainfall was missed; I will correct that sometime tomorrow.

Some areas of the Temecula Valley may be experiencing frost conditions this morning. Yesterday I issued a first ever frost warning via email to subscribers to the email list. Just because a frost warning is issued doesn not mean it will happen; I try to err on the safe side. If you find this useful, consider subscribing the the list.

The new wireless rain gauge underreported actual rain totals for the recent storm. The actual total should have been between 0.59" and 1", according to other reports in the Temecula Valley. I'm temporarily going to switch back to the older rain gauge and will correct Saturday's reading to 0.59".

I've added last year's high and low onto the site, and reorganized the high and low section.

2:32pm A problem with some local internet trunk lines knocked hundreds of San Diego businesses (including this web site) offline between about 10:30am and 1:15pm this afternoon. Service has been restored! Sorry to those who couldn't get through. No weather data was lost as a result of this outage.

Apologies for the errant rain totals you may have seen on the site yesterday. My new wireless rain sensor appears to be catching interference on the frequency it was operating on. The interference triggered wild rainfall totals starting about noon until I noticed. I've adjusted the frequency and we'll see if it happens again.

The new wireless rain gauge was deployed yesterday and successfully captured rainfall from yesterday's storm. There will be a picture of it within the next week or so on the About page.

The National Weather Service has adjusted the expected rain accumulations. We should expect between one quarter to one half of an inch in our area. The mountains may get up to an inch. Snow levels are expected to fall to 6500 feet by Tuesday morning, so there will be snow up in the mountains and snow may affect travel in some of the local passes.

Among the things predicted by the National Weather Service for the tomorrow's upcoming storm is snow about 7000 feet in the mountains (the first of the season) and rain accumulations up to one inch in coastal areas and foothills. Rain amounts in our area should be between one third to one half of an inch.

I've bought and received a new wireless rain gauge to replace the wired one that's given me so much trouble over the past year. The new gauge features a tipping bucket design that should be highly reliable. This gauge costs as much as some of the cheaper weather stations and meets NWS specifications for bucket size. I'm hoping to run tests Saturday and have it deployed by Sunday.

2:19pm: So much for hot weather this afternoon. After heating up to 80°F, the temperature has fallen off eight degrees ... The high pressure system is weakening. The rain chance has been moved up to Saturday night (30% chance).

The new banner on this site was done by Scott Bram. Scott is also doing some forecast icons for TemeculaWeather.com that should make their debut shortly on this site.

The NWS San Diego office publishes something called the forecast discussion twice a day. It has detailed information about developing weather conditions, rather than the straight forecasts that are a part of their Inland Empire forecast and which you see adapted here to Temecula. Perhaps the threat of rain was detailed in the discussion, which I read occasionally but did not Saturday morning. The current discussion predicts this weak storm will quickly move on and be replaced by weak high pressure the rest of the week.

For the next few months, overnight temperatures for the most part are going to be in the 40's. The mornings are starting to get a little cold. It's normal in December and January to have low temperatures in the 30's. The high temperatures should continue to drop through November and December as well. the Temecula area can have frosts, but they don't occur very often. Last year there were only a handful of them.

It should be in the 60's for trick-or-treating tonight.

The Hourly Summary page now shows current conditions as well, and is now updated every ten minutes like the main page. I will be working to get rainfall in there so people can see when the rain fell.

The National Weather Service's San Diego office is now incorporating data from TemeculaWeather.com's weather station into their forecasting! I received an email message yesterday to this effect. They mentioned that they have little real time data from the southern Inland Empire, so our data will help them produce a better forecast.

My internet service provider from the house had difficulties for a couple of hours last night (from 8pm to 10pm or so) and the weather data was stale for a while. That was the first service interruption in more than two months; a pretty good run.

I expect to have the email list up and running soon, possibly later today!

A story about this web site appears in the Sunday edition of The Californian, an edition of the North County Times. You can read the text of this story online. I'd like to thank John Hunneman and The Californian staff for noticing this site and taking the time to publish such a nice story.

2:30 pm So much for today's forecast. Today is only the third day above 100° in Temecula so far this year. Today also features the highest temperature of the year to date. The humidity is very low, but it sure is baking outside.

Today I'm unveiling the wireless version of our site, which can be accessed on most internet-capable cellular phones with mini-browsers. If you have a phone that supports a wireless standard called WML, you can now access current weather information wherever you are on your cell phone. If your cell phone mini browser supports a "goto url" function, just type in temeculaweather.com for a mini, text only version of our site.

I'm also unveiling advertising today. If you have a local business and are looking to reach a growing online audience of local residents, visitors, and people looking to relocate to the Temecula Valley, consider placing advertising on the Temecula Weather pages.

In Temecula today, conditions are already sunny, and the high temperature should be around 87°F.

My heartfelt condolences go out to the thousands of victims and their families. I pray for all them in this time of shock, sorrow and anger, that they will have peace and that they will be consoled.

In Temecula today, it will be sunny on this day of reflection, following fog and low clounds this morning, with nice temperatures around 83°F.

Yesterday also marked the one year anniversary of the first visit to this site. Since then there have been over 36,000 visits. Thanks for making TemeculaWeather.com a success!

I should point out again that all I'm doing here is customizing the NWS forecast to the local area, based on my observations for this summer. I was two degrees too high Monday and three too high yesterday; I don't think that's too bad, and I think today may be even closer.

Yesterday's high of 100.5°F was the warmest of the year to date, and the first official triple digit high of the year. This is the latest in the year that I can remember the first hundred degree day occurring. On an average temperature basis, July 4th remains the warmest day this year.

5:18 pm Today's high was 99.9°F, which many saw rounded up to 100°F on the web site this afternoon. That won't do it for the archive, which uses the extra digit of precision and will not remember today as a hundred degree day. More high heat is predicted for tomorrow.

I've now placed a normal temperature calculation for the current weather report directly below the current temperature. This should give visitors a quick indication of how close to normal the current conditions are. Note that last year at this time was characterized by blistering hot days, so that accounts for the normal temperatures being so high in the afternoon.

8:57 pm The 36 hour summary has been added to the site. Note that rainfall is missing from it for the time being. New to the summary are normal temperatures, winds, humidity and dewpoint for times of the day. These are calculated on an 11 day moving average just like the normal high and low on the main page. Please let me know what you think.

2:41 pm Connectivity restored. And this was after I did quite a bit of work to get a backup modem line to do a one time dial and update the site. The modem link's success shipped the last 1400 records to the site only twenty minutes ahead of ISDN service being restored.

4:51 pm Today flirted with 100°F, topped out at 98°F, and has slid back down. Today's high is the highest temperature recorded so far this year, and will likely be the highest average temperature when it is done as well (currently July 4th is the warmest day of the year with an average temperature of 81.7°F), due to the early heat today. The all-time highest average temperature of 85.2°F occurred September 16, 2000.

1:29 pm Problem resolved: The internet service provider has reported routing problems that are now fixed!

1:55 pm Over 80: And this day won't be one of them!

1:09 pm Mid-day problems: Looks like connectivity problems from the house to the server. The weather data is more than one hour out of date at this point.

Some people refer to the weather patterns we see this time of year as "June Gloom". June typically has lows in the upper 50's, held up by marine layer (low clouds). The marine layer also holds the daytime highs down. This far inland (Temecula is approximately 20 miles from the coast), the layer is thinner and usually burns off by midmorning. Then Temecula heats up for the rest of the day. Around dusk, you can see the marine layer coming back in from the west, hugging the hills and belching through the Temecula gorge (which the Santa Margarita river flows through to the ocean). It is a strange, unique sight. The marine layer pattern usually breaks by July. Last year was an exception; the pattern lasted into mid-July. When this pattern does finally break, summer conditions will begin.

The wind did indeed pick up, and temperature did not reach 100°.