Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
A dangerous heat wave will impact the Pacific Northwest this week. It won’t be anywhere near as strong as the “Heat Dome” of June 26-28, but it will still bring record highs to large portions of the Pacific NW Wednesday – Friday, with record highs likely holding on for the inland Pacific NW on Saturday. […]
As of 8/2, Portland and Seattle have seen 48 and 49 consecutive days without measurable precipitation, respectively. Such dry spells aren’t unheard of for the summer – Portland’s record for consecutive dry days is 71 and was set in 1967, and Seattle’s is 55 and was set just back in 2017. But this anomalously long […]
Last week, the Bootleg Fire, a 400,000 acre conflagration that is still only 40% contained, made headlines when it tripped off a set of high-voltage transmission lines known as the California-Oregon Intertie that transmit electricity between the Pacific Northwest and California. At the time, California was experiencing an extreme heat wave and very high electricity […]
“Unprecedented” is an overused meteorological buzzword, but in the case of the June 2021 Pacific Northwest Heatwave, it is absolutely warranted. This heatwave shattered meteorologist’s preconceptions of what the upper-limit to temperatures is in the Willamette Valley and Pacific NW as a whole. The map of high temperatures recorded on Monday 6/28 defies superlatives. My […]
It was hot Sunday and today! My brother came down to Portland for the weekend, and yesterday, we went cliff diving at High Rocks Park on the Clackamas River. There were some pretty acrobatic divers jumping off the rocks, and there were several lifeguards and an ambulance van on standby in case there were any […]
11:00 pm Monday What a shift in weather we’ve seen over the last week! In my last blog on 5/31, I was talking about the potential for record heat in Portland on Tuesday, 6/1. Portland indeed set a record that day, hitting 95 and breaking the record of 94 set back in 1970. Perhaps even […]
It was toasty this Memorial Day weekend! Portland hit 82 on Saturday, 84 on Sunday, and 88 today, According to chief KPTV meteorologist Mark Nelsen, this was the warmest Memorial Day weekend by average high temperature since 1992, which had an average high of 86 degrees over the three days and a peak of 93 […]
The warmest temperatures of the year are on tap for this weekend into early next week, and we’ll have super low tides to go along with the hot weather. This post ended up being kinda (dare I say, unnecessarily?) long, so here’s a quick summary. Expect a warming trend from now through Tuesday for the […]
Last Wednesday, the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), a government agency that oversees water resource management in the Western US and Great Plains, announced that they would close the main irrigational canal that draws from Upper Klamath Lake for the 2021 irrigation season. This canal, known as the “A” canal in the USBR-sponsored Klamath […]
What happens when you combine an unstable airmass, a mountain range, and daytime heating? You get scattered afternoon/evening thunderstorms that bubble up along the Cascade crest! We saw a ton of those today and they made for some really pretty views looking east from Portland to the Cascades. Today, a weak upper-level trough moved south […]
