Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
With all of the heavy rain we saw over the weekend, many rivers throughout Western Oregon have reached flood stage and are continuing to rise. Here in Portland, I’ve never seen the Willamette as high, muddy, and debris-filled as it is now. Right now, minor or moderate flooding is occurring on the Siuslaw, Coast Fork […]
Well, it happened. A truly epic late-season snowstorm walloped the Southern Willamette Valley Sunday night and Monday, knocking out power to tens of thousands of people and bringing over a foot of snow to Eugene and over twice that to Bend. Even Portland saw flurries for much of the day, with locations above 500 feet […]
Finally! In case you haven’t noticed, the weather thus far this storm season has been pretty boring. We’ve yet to see any windstorms, rainstorms, or snowstorms of significance, either in the mountains or the lowlands. But that will change tomorrow. A truly massive storm stretching all the way from the Gulf of Alaska to the […]
Hi y’all! It’s been a while, and I apologize for the delay in posts. I had some technical difficulties installing an SSL and spent a lot of time trying to configure a CNAME (an alternate domain for the same destination) for a WeatherTogether subdomain. The good part, however, is that WeatherTogether is now in HTTPS, […]
So far this autumn, most of our precipitation has come in the form of scattered showers as opposed to stratiform rain. That isn’t to say that these showers haven’t been heavy at times… I was biking back home from work on Wednesday, September 12 this past month and got stuck in lock-step with a very […]
After such a prolonged, wet late winter/early spring in 2017, I was hoping that 2018 would feature a more abrupt transition to the warm, sunny stretches of April that give us a taste of our beautiful summer to come, but those wishes have no doubt been in vain. If April sunshine is a runway, we’ve […]
With a strong atmospheric river underway, I thought I’d take some time to delve a little deeper into these phenomena. In this blog, I’ll cover the basic characteristics of an atmospheric river, how these atmospheric rivers form, and a brief summary of how they relate to the Earth’s heat budget. Throughout the blog, I’ll use […]
Today was just a prelude to the stormy weekend ahead, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t exciting! A cool and unstable air mass poured into the region, bringing brief but heavy showers to the lowlands and heavy snow in the mountains above 5,000 feet. The satellite picture taken this afternoon by NASA’s polar-orbiting TERRA satellite […]
Our first respectable storm of the season drenched Western Washington and Oregon with heavy rain on Wednesday and Thursday, bringing an inch of rain to many places in the lowlands and several inches in the mountains. Over the past 24 hours, the rain has primarily been concentrated over SW Washington and NW Oregon as a […]
One of my recent posts talked about how the transition to winter is quicker than the transition to spring. Though the post was concerned with temperature changes and had a global perspective, we in the Pacific Northwest tend to experience a particularly rapid pattern change as our summertime Eastern Pacific high disintegrates and strong zonal […]
