Wednesday, February 10, 2016 11:14 am Earlier this week, a massive ridge of high pressure settled over the West Coast, giving us clear skies, light winds, and extremely warm temperatures, especially if you got above the humongous inversion that was insulating many lowland regions from the extreme warmth. Many places were extraordinarily warm; Quillayute on the […]
Is This Year’s El Niño A Bust?
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 1:42 pm Average precipitation anomalies from El Niño events. Credit: NOAA For winter-weather lovers and skiers in the Pacific Northwest, an El Niño forecast sounds like a death sentence. Such a forecast conjures up visions of no major windstorms, hardly any lowland snow, below-average snow in the mountains, and a “death […]
Why Did Yemen and Socotra Just Get Hit By Consecutive Tropical Cyclones?
Saturday, November 7, 2015 2:13 pm Less than a week ago, Cyclone Chapala slammed into Socotra, a small Yemeni Island some 150 miles east of the Horn of Africa, and Yemen, a small country on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula currently embroiled in a brutal civil war, becoming the first hurricane-force cyclone to hit […]
An Overview of Hurricane Patricia And Its Relationship To El Nino
Saturday, October 24, 2015 8:09 pm Visible satellite image of Hurricane Patricia at record intensity approaching the Western Mexico Coast. Taken October 23, 2015. Credit: NASA Terra/MODIS Satellite Patricia was the deepest cyclone ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Deeper than Wilma, deeper than Katrina, deeper than Camille, and far deeper than Sandy (all these storms […]
What Was the 1997-1998 El Niño Like?
Saturday, October 17, 2015 4:01 pm Beach erosion by Pacifica, California due to storms during the 1997-1998 El Niño event. Credit: USGS With all of this talk about the “Godzilla” El Niño of 2015, it’s important to remember that an event of this magnitude is not unprecedented. Back during the 1997-1998 winter, we saw the largest El Niño on […]
My Fall Forecast
Sunday, September 13, 2015 5:19 pm If you ask an astronomer when summer ends, they’ll tell you “September 23.” That is the date of the autumnal equinox, the date when the day and night are approximately equal in length (the day is always a couple minutes longer because the sun does not set all at […]
An El Niño For California!
Wednesday, April 22, 2015 10:14 am Last year, climatologists were warning us that we could have one of the biggest El Niños in history, perhaps one even rivaling the legendary El Niño of 1997-1998. Those forecasts never verified, but you wouldn’t know that by our weather this past winter. El Niño winters are generally warmer and […]
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Is El Nino Making A Comeback?
Friday, October 10, 2014 5:08 pm After a return to neutral conditions over the summer, we will likely see weak El Nino conditions for the 2014-2015 winter. At least that’s my prediction. And I will tell you why. There’s a wonderful, wonderful website hosted by the National Weather Service’s Climate Prediction Center that you can […]
SST Anomalies vs. Psychological Fortitude
Thursday, August 22, 2013 12:19 p.m. People always want to know what the upcoming late autumn and winter weather will be like. Of course, it’s impossible to predict individual storms so far out in advance (but that doesn’t make the Old Farmer’s Almanac any less entertaining), but it is certainly possible to make some general […]
La Nada?
Monday, October 8, 2012 11:03 A.M. Most people know what El Nino is, and most people also know what La Nina is. But if you throw around the highly scientific term “La Nada,” most people will raise their eyebrows, cock their head, and ask you to repeat yourself. “La Nada” is the term affectionately given […]
