Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
Since Christmas, the storm track has shifted south to California, bringing heavy rain and mountain snow to the Golden State. Parts of the Sierra Nevada have seen over 20 inches of liquid-equivalent precipitation, much of it in the form of snow. The most recent tempest occurred on January 4th and 5th. The image below shows […]
Fall is the most rapidly-changing season here in the Pacific Northwest. September generally starts off warm and sunny, with some of our highest fire danger of the entire year. But by late September/early October, temperatures cool substantially as our days rapidly become shorter, and typically, by the 3rd or 4th week of October, we start […]
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 […]
We’ve seen a dramatic shift in most model solutions over the past 48 hours. On Monday, models showed a very deep low – approximately 965-970 mb – making landfall near the northern tip of Vancouver Island, bringing very strong winds/extremely high waves to the coast, windy conditions to Western Washington, and breezy conditions to Western […]
Good evening all! There’s a lot of buzz regarding Friday’s storm, so I thought I’d write a quick update clarifying some of the potential impacts of the storm and how the forecast has changed since yesterday. Models continue to show a very strong but weakening cyclone arriving from the west on Friday, bringing heavy rain […]
According to a 2005 Gallup poll, Americans think November is the 8th best month of the year. November has a few things going for it; the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, increasingly competitive football games, not-shaving – but it seems most Americans believe these attributes are overshadowed by how dark, cold, and depressing the month is […]
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 […]
By now, many of us have heard of the term “bomb cyclone.” Just like “polar vortex,” “bomb cyclone”/”bombogenesis”/”meteorological bomb” (and many other bomb-related derivatives) has actually been in the meteorological literature for decades, first entering the vernacular in the Bergen School in the 40s and 50s to describe the explosively-developing cyclones over the North Atlantic. […]
Early autumn is usually pretty tranquil for the Pacific Northwest. The semi-permanent ridge of high pressure in the Eastern Pacific that keeps us so dry and mild through the summer is usually still robust enough to keep the storm track to our north, and any storms that do impact our area are generally pretty wimpy, […]
The strongest storm thus far of the 2018-2019 storm season brought a brief but intense blow to many areas last night, with many locations in the Willamette Valley and Puget Sound experiencing 50 mph gusts and a few locations even hitting 60! I’ve heard that some folks are calling this storm the “Epiphany Storm” since […]
