Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
It has been a wonderful past few days for mountain snowfall, and we have gobs of additional snow on the way this week! I was skiing in Whistler from the 14th through the 18th, and although the first two days were sunny and the third was rainy, the 17th and 18th had heavy snow all […]
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 […]
The 2016-2017 winter has been an extraordinarily wet winter for California, but Washington and Northern Oregon have actually been drier than normal for most of the winter. But with Seattle on track to break their all-time reocrd for monthly rainfall in February and Portland not too far behind, one wonders what is responsible for the […]
Tonight’s model runs are in, and every model has shifted the plume of moisture I was talking about in last night’s blog slightly further north. Now, it appears as though Portland will be too warm for snow, while Seattle will see several inches of extremely wet, gloppy snow that may have trouble sticking at the […]
I apologize for not posting as much as I would like recently! I’ve been very busy tweaking the site and preparing for WeatherTogether’s booth at WeatherFest, which is part of the American Meteorological Society’s (AMS) annual conference. As luck would have it, the AMS conference is in Seattle this winter, so it definitely made sense […]
A major pattern change is in store for us next week. After dealing with very cold temperatures and heaps of snow for those lucky folks in Portland, we will see temperatures in the 50s, snow levels above 7000 feet, and very heavy rain as an atmospheric river plows through the Pacific Northwest. There is still […]
Wednesday, February 17, 2016 6:15 pm It was a bad week for the snow-lovers of the Pacific Northwest. Over the past couple days, we’ve had very moist and relatively mild flow coming into our region from the WSW. The result? Heavy rains on the Olympics and Northern Cascades, with much lighter precipitation in the Seattle […]
