Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
“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 […]
La Nina years are known for bringing hefty snows to the Cascades. I still remember the La Nina year of 2007-2008, when I went skiing in the Alpental backcountry on Memorial Day with my mom. We had to skirt around waterfalls & avoid a few bare patches, but overall there was still a ton of […]
When I was younger, my parents would get me the “Old Farmers Almanac” every year for Christmas. In a time before I knew about dynamical climate models and ensemble-based, bias-corrected seasonal forecasting, the Old Farmer’s Almanac seasonal forecasts were a godsend. Part of the allure of the Almanac for an upstart weather zealot like myself […]
On Wednesday, the New York times came out with an alarming article. It said that a new, high-resolution model was showing that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), a massive ice sheet west of the “Transantarctic Mountains” that divides the continent into eastern and western sections, could melt far faster than previously thought, with sea […]
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 12:24 pm Charles Dudley Warner once said that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” That time has come and passed, as we now have some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world running millions of lines of code and assimilating terabytes of data to make […]
Thursday, January 28, 2016 1:44 pm Credit: NOAA National Center for Environmental InformationRetrieved from www.resilientdesign.org 2015 was destined to be the warmest year on record. In terms of ocean temperatures, we had one of the strongest El Niños on record brewing in the Tropical Pacific, a mighty “Blob” of warm water in the Northeast Pacific, and abundant […]
Wednesday, September 23, 2015 3:52 pm Albuquerque Tea Party, April 2009 Global warming deniers come in all shapes and sizes. Some are quite bold in their statements, denying any reasonable scientific claim, and instead claiming that global warming is a ‘socialist scam.’ Others are more subtle, claiming that evidence […]
Tuesday, March 31, 2015 11:27 am Why do people deny global warming? While it is a hypothesis and not a scientific law, this hypothesis has verified since the dawn of the industrial revolution, with the Earth warming nearly 1 degree Celsius since then. Take a look at the picture below, which shows the increase in […]
Tuesday, January 7, 2014 12:14 a.m. I don’t know how many of you watched the Packers-49ers game on Sunday, but it looked absolutely frigid. The grass was brown. The surface temperature was 3 or 4 degrees. Green Bay actually got down to -18 that day, which is a record. That’ll freeze cheese. My cousin Colleen […]
Thursday, July 25, 2013 11:32 P.M. I’ve been thinking lately. About a lot of things… family, fishing, friendships, and, if you can believe it, weather patterns. But there’s something more that I’ve been thinking about, and that is anthropogenic global warming. I’ve touched on this subject quite a few times in this blog, and I’ve […]
