Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
11 pm Saturday After the coldest spring on record for portions of the Pacific Northwest, true summertime warmth has finally arrived! Seattle reached 77 Friday and 86 today, and Portland hit 84 Friday and 93 today – both under bright sunny skies. And even hotter weather is expected Sunday and Monday, with triple digit temperatures […]
I was treated to an incredible sunset on Whidbey Island in Puget Sound tonight! I took the below photo while kayaking in Cultus Bay facing WNW. One subtle feature (but one that really jumps out to a meteorologist!) are the “cloud bands” to the northwest, in the right half of the picture. These are due […]
When most people think of the conditions needed for wildfires to grow, marine pushes aren’t the first thing to come to mind. Our famous summertime “natural air conditioning” brings a thick layer of morning clouds and keeps nighttime temperatures in 50s even in the heart of summer. But it also brings very windy conditions to […]
Sorry for such a hiatus on blogs pertaining to Pacific Northwest weather! I had a backlog of storm chasing blogs to finish up, but now that they have all finally been posted, it’s time to get back to talking about the weather in our neck of the woods. But before we focus on the Pacific […]
The first major heat wave of the year is living up to the hype! Portland and Salem hit 98 and 101 respectively yesterday, and today, they simply switched highs. According to Mike Newman (a fellow weather buff from the Portland area), today’s high of 101 at the Portland Int’l Airport was just 1 degree below […]
Good morning everybody! As the above graphic shows, we have a giant ridge of high pressure in the Eastern Pacific right now. This is a very typical August setup, and tends to give us cloudy mornings, sunny afternoons, and a healthy seabreeze on the coast. For the next few days, it looks like we’ll have […]
There’s a reason why very few people in the Pacific Northwest have air conditioning. For much of the summer, cool, marine air flows into Western Washington at night, keeping low temperatures in the 50s and preventing our residences from getting too hot. Of course, we have those periods in the summer when highs skyrocket into […]
Saturday, August 6, 2011 12:52 A.M. (up late) When storms come our way, I usually look at multiple weather models, because they all show different outcomes from the same set of present conditions. Sometimes these different outcomes are pretty similar, and other times, they are completely out of sync. When there is an especially tricky […]
Monday, August 1st, 2011 3:37 P.M. Marine Push(up) When people think of Seattle, they probably think of coffee, bad sports teams, and people with webbed feet. They probably don’t think of air conditioning. However, we can get pretty hot in the summer. I remember a couple years back at Sea-Tac when the mercury hit 103 […]
Thursday, June 16, 2011 4:55 P.M. Greetings everybody, now that I am graduated from high school I can continue writing on this blog more regularly. It may seem like we have been really cool and cloudy lately, but this is actually pretty typical June weather. The last few days have only been slightly cooler than […]
