Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
We really lucked out with our fire season west of the Cascades this year. After one of the driest springs and hottest/driest summers on record, vegetation was incredibly dry and the environment incredibly flammable. Mercifully, the last half of August were cooler-than-average, and September was both cooler and wetter-than-average. And most importantly, neither had dry thunderstorms […]
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. […]
11:00 pm Monday What a shift in weather we’ve seen over the last week! In my last blog on 5/31, I was talking about the potential for record heat in Portland on Tuesday, 6/1. Portland indeed set a record that day, hitting 95 and breaking the record of 94 set back in 1970. Perhaps even […]
Many locations across the Pacific NW have seen their driest start to spring on record. As of April 22, Portland has seen a paltry 1.64 inches of rain since March 1, which is more than 4 inches below-average. According to the US Drought Monitor, such a dry spring has allowed the moderate drought conditions that […]
Spring used to be my least-favorite season. Back in elementary and middle school, I grieved the transition to boring weather, the seasonal closing of ski resorts in the Cascades, and the departure of the windy, rainy weather that captured my imagination on many a winter day. I’d much rather stay up all night waiting for […]
What beautiful weather we’ve had this week! I’ve been outside in shorts & a t-shirt the past few days, and let me tell ya – 60 degrees has never felt so warm before! The snowstorms of mid-February seem like a distant memory, though the widespread tree damage around my neighborhood is a sober reminder of […]
It’s been a while since we had a significant, regionwide, winter windstorm hit the Pacific NW. The last major windstorm to hit the Inland Northwest was the 11/17/2015 windstorm, which brought an extended period of 60-70 mph gusts to Eastern Washington and devastated electrical grids around the region. Avista Corporation, a utility headquartered in Spokane […]
One of our family friends is a brilliant oceanography professor and extremely accomplished skier, and he has a t-shirt that says “Viva La Nina.” It’s a perfect shirt for an oceanographer (since La Nina is a coupled oceanic/atmospheric phenomenon) and a Pacific Northwest skier, as La Ninas tend to bring above-average mountain snowfall to our […]
Happy Christmas Eve everybody! I hope this post finds you all in good health and cheer, or at least as good as things can be considering the times. I was fortunate enough to witness the “Grand Conjunction” last night with Jupiter and Saturn . If you missed it this year, have no fear – it […]
When most Portlanders think of December, they think of Christmas trees, advent calendars, and cars with those big bows on them. Certainly not sunny skies, and much less 50+ degree temperatures to accompany them! But that’s exactly what we’ve seen to begin December. There was no measurable precipitation for the first 5 days of December […]
