Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
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 […]
Hi all! I hope everybody had a great weekend and enjoyed a rainy Sunday across the region. As damp and dreary as today has been, several even stronger storms will move through the area this week and will give us the classic trifecta of winter weather: wind, rain, and very heavy mountain snow. If you […]
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, […]
In this blog, I’ll touch on what I’ve interpreted as widespread, sensationalized coverage of Hurricane/Tropical Storm/Tropical Depression/Post-Tropical Storm Florence. While Florence has absolutely been the highest-impact U.S. landfalling storm since Hurricane Maria devastated Dominica and Puerto Rico, the media has also been dramatically exaggerating the storm’s effects. There are some fragrant examples of fake news, […]
Thanks to an atmospheric river last Sunday that brought flooding to many rivers flowing off the Olympics and Washington Cascades and a strong ridge just offshore for the first half of this week, we’ve had mild temperatures to begin February. Temperatures have been particularly warm east of the Cascade crest – in fact, Walla Walla […]
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 […]
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 […]
By Charlie Phillips AND Mark Ingalls Tropical Storm Harvey has turned from a severe event into a catastrophic, record-breaking event that may go down as the costliest flooding disaster in the history of the United States. And yes, that includes Hurricane Katrina. Some important notes before we start: If you are in Texas and find […]
I gotta go to bed soon (gotta wake up at 4:30 tomorrow!), so this post is going to be brief. But there’s no way I could nod off to sleep without writing something about this incredibly strong storm. Hurricane Harvey made landfall at the northern tip of San Jose Island at 10 pm CDT time […]
