Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
In my last post on August 9, I talked about a record heat wave slated for the upcoming week. After a month-long blogging hiatus, I get to blog about something much different – a chilly, early-season atmospheric river expected to bring heavy rain Friday & Saturday morning, with periods of rain persisting through the weekend. […]
With all of the heavy rain we saw over the weekend, many rivers throughout Western Oregon have reached flood stage and are continuing to rise. Here in Portland, I’ve never seen the Willamette as high, muddy, and debris-filled as it is now. Right now, minor or moderate flooding is occurring on the Siuslaw, Coast Fork […]
So far this autumn, most of our precipitation has come in the form of scattered showers as opposed to stratiform rain. That isn’t to say that these showers haven’t been heavy at times… I was biking back home from work on Wednesday, September 12 this past month and got stuck in lock-step with a very […]
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 […]
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 […]
Monday, March 7, 2016 1:43 pm The Snohomish River topping its banks on December 9, 2015. Credit: Brie Hawkins I’ll be the first to admit that weather forecasters are often wrong. After all, weather forecasting is the only job where you can be wrong 90 percent of the time and keep your job. Still, this winter has […]
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 1:41 am Yesterday, I wrote about the Eastern third of the country and how much of that region was profoundly affected by a major blizzard that halted over 13,000 flights and caused 3 billion dollars in damage. Now, the weather action has shifted back to our neck of the woods, and […]
Wednesday, September 3, 2014 2:14 pm I’ve been wondering when we’d get a “zone to end all zones,” and this is the best one since the morning of December 18, 2008. I don’t think anything can top that one… I got 4-6 inches of snow and school was canceled. Our house also almost got struck […]
Monday, April 8, 2013 1:02 P.M. April is known for “showers and sunbreaks,” which might as well become a trademarked phrase around here since it is probably the most commonly mentioned phrase in Seattle, meteorological or otherwise. Imagine how rich the original creator of that phrase would be if news stations and the National Weather […]
Thursday, November 24, 2011 1:16 P.M. November 23, 2011 – taken from KOMO News I finally found some stats from the storm that hit us earlier this week. Below are some rainfall totals for areas in Washington from 7 A.M. Monday to 7 A.M. Wednesday. These statistics were taken off Scott Sistek’s KOMO blog, “Partly […]
