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Recent West Coast storms; Venus has a new boyfriend - 12.31.04
The current rash of West Coast storms is linked to a dynamic relationship between two planets.
The Mars, Venus tandem described in a hotspots article early in December has an updated version. Venus has been spotted in the eastern Pacific with Mercury, having passed by Mars a few weeks ago and left him in the dust. The pattern is that just as Venus got to Mercury's position the ever-changeable Mercury reversed direction from retrograde to direct. Now they can be counted upon to be inseparable for the next few weeks as they make their way together towards the coast.
Fig.1
The chart in figure 1 is a comparison of the Venus/ Mars event earlier in the month to the Venus/Mercury event of the past few days. In it the jet stream from the first event is seen as the green arrow. The loops in the jet are not as strong as the recent events since the Mars/ Venus conjunction was not really a spasm pattern. Seen from the perspective of Doc Weather this kind of pattern is known as a spasm. It is a spasm because one planet moving in an opposite direction suddenly shifts direction just in time for a transiting planet to link up motion with it. The resulting release of tension in the atmosphere is often accompanied by strong turbulence in the longitude of the event. It often happens that when the two are transiting in tandem after a spasm the atmosphere in the longitude of the spasm is highly disturbed for as long as the two are accompanying each other in longitude. This is seen in the chart as the red looping arrow. This looping pattern has brought many storms from the Gulf of Alaska into the West Coast since Venus and her new boyfriend have been hanging out just east of Hawaii. They will only part ways in the third week of January so we might expect the storm patterns on the West Coast to continue for a while.