Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
I’m not a big beer drinker. However, I always have a few cans of Coors in my fridge in case some friends come over and want to crack a cold one. Why Coors? Because the mountains turn blue when it’s “as cold as the Rockies,” and since I have no stock in the taste, the […]
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 […]
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 […]
We had the best Halloween weather in 95 years and stunning weather today, and Monday will be another beautiful day with only a few high clouds increasing late in the day. But by Tuesday morning, the first of several systems this week will bring rain to the area, and on Friday, we’ll see a shift […]
The Pacific Northwest isn’t known for its rapidly changing seasons. We don’t exactly plunge into winter like the Northern Plains, and our slow trudge towards summer out of the depths of January is even slower. June is the hottest month of the year for the Desert SW, but many years, while Death Valley is sweltering […]
This past Sunday, I went trout fishing on the Yakima River with my dad and brother. The trout were there, but they were sluggish and not particularly enthusiastic about our flies. We didn’t had any hits on dry flies and had a few hits on nymphs, but we were unable to bring any to the […]
In my last blog post on 8/30, I warned of a “late-season heatwave with offshore flow” that would “dramatically increase fire danger for the Pacific Northwest.” But when I wrote that, never in my wildest dreams did I imagine that we’d see a wind/firestorm the intensity of the one witnessed earlier this month. I work […]
The weather sounds like the most inconsequential thing to talk about during these times, but if it weren’t for – you know – the global pandemic and revolution stuff – it would absolutely make front-line news. A tornado came through Damascus, OR yesterday evening! Take a look at this video from Tim Lussier… it’s not […]
I’m committing one of the cardinal sins of weather blogging here: putting a high-impact, but uncertain, forecast in the title of a weather blog. I truly believe that this is an unethical practice, and that those who do it are trading a little part of their journalistic soul in exchange for a few more clicks. […]
Saturday’s rain was refreshing, wasn’t it? Some spots saw far more rain than forecast as a weak upper-level low slowly drifted southeastward from the Olympic Peninsula through the Willamette Valley and into Central Oregon, while other spots saw hardly any rain at all. This was particularly true for the Puget Sound region, where a local […]
