On Saturday, President Barack Obama and Chinese President Xi Jinping formally agreed to ratify the Paris Climate Agreement, marking a great leap forward in tackling global warming. Before Saturday, 24 countries accounting for 1.08% of global greenhouse gas had ratified the agreement. For the agreement to go into effect, 55 countries producing at least 55% […]
El Nino Is Dead
FINALLY! After being in El Nino conditions off-and-on since autumn 2014, we are finally solidly back into the “neutral” area, and it is looking increasingly likely that we will be in a La Nina regime for the latter half of 2016 into 2017. With the exception of Nino 4, all Nino regions have near-average […]
A New Climate Change Movement
There has been a lot of talk about climate change, and how we need to do everything we can to mitigate it. At the same time, there has been a lot of talk about how the climate is “always changing,” and that there’s nothing we should or even can do about decreasing our carbon emissions. […]
Viva La Niña!
Credit: NOAA Earlier this week, my good friends at NOAA (well, hopefully we’ll be best buds someday) issued a La Niña watch for the Tropical Pacific. Some of the models were showing a transition to a La Niña for next winter in the months before, but there was enough spread and uncertainty in the models […]
The Demise of The West Antarctic Ice Sheet
On Wednesday, the New York times came out with an alarming article. It said that a new, high-resolution model was showing that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet (WAIS), a massive ice sheet west of the “Transantarctic Mountains” that divides the continent into eastern and western sections, could melt far faster than previously thought, with sea […]
Seattle’s Rainiest Winter Ever
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 […]
The Transition of Seasons
Thursday, February 25, 2016 12:17 pm I apologize for the delay in blog posts and Facebook updates. Yes, I’ve been busy, but moreover, there hasn’t been much weather going on. I’ve had trouble thinking of things to write about, so I’ve started posts and just never finished them. Perhaps one day I will. Then, it […]
Did El Niño Come? It Depends Who You Ask.
Wednesday, February 10, 2016 11:14 am Earlier this week, a massive ridge of high pressure settled over the West Coast, giving us clear skies, light winds, and extremely warm temperatures, especially if you got above the humongous inversion that was insulating many lowland regions from the extreme warmth. Many places were extraordinarily warm; Quillayute on the […]
Global Warming: Too Little Action, Too Much Reaction
Wednesday, January 20, 2016 12:24 pm Charles Dudley Warner once said that “everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.” That time has come and passed, as we now have some of the most powerful supercomputers in the world running millions of lines of code and assimilating terabytes of data to make […]
2015: The Warmest Year On Record
Thursday, January 28, 2016 1:44 pm Credit: NOAA National Center for Environmental InformationRetrieved from www.resilientdesign.org 2015 was destined to be the warmest year on record. In terms of ocean temperatures, we had one of the strongest El Niños on record brewing in the Tropical Pacific, a mighty “Blob” of warm water in the Northeast Pacific, and abundant […]
