Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
Howdy everybody! I’m back after a bit of a hiatus – with our boring weather of late and the first image ever taken of a black hole coming to light last month, I’ve been more focused on the cosmos than the clouds as of late. But with record-breaking temperatures on tap today through Saturday, I thought […]
Yes, you read that right. Unless something goes horribly awry (say, a massive brush fire right next to the weather station at Portland International Airport), next week will feature the hottest weather for Portland until at least mid-April 2019. After January 1, Portland’s record high doesn’t rise above 80 degrees until April 7, and at this point, […]
What a refreshing weekend! With a high of only 68 degrees, Sunday was Portland’s first sub-70 degree day since we hit 69 degrees on June 14. Our chill was brought to us via a deep upper-level trough arriving from the NW, and though we warmed up to 79 today as this trough passed east, Glacier […]
Well… it couldn’t last forever. The upper-level trough that pushed through the region last Friday ushered in a much cooler and cleaner airmass to give us a refreshing end to the workweek and start to the weekend. But as a ridge strengthened over the area on Saturday and onshore flow decreased, high-elevation smoke started to […]
I don’t know about you, but I thoroughly enjoyed our sudden switch to cooler weather on Saturday. I was in Seattle for a weekend of boat chores and band practice, but even more fun than pressure-washing our boat was having all my windows open Friday night and feeling a strong, westerly, marine breeze suck all […]
Hi all! I’ll start by giving a “life update” of sorts: I’ve moved from being a meteorologist at Avangrid to being a meteorologist at Portland General Electric! At Avangrid, my work was primarily focused on very short-term, hourly energy forecasts for Avangrid’s wind farms along the Columbia River Gorge, and I worked a rotating shift […]
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 […]
It’s been five days since my initial post, which, despite describing the most boring weather feature in existence, actually became my most-viewed post ever with over 1,000 views this week! That’s because Scott Sistek, a University of Washington meteorology grad who works for KOMO as a content writer/off-air meteorologist, was generous enough to share my […]
Folks west of the Cascade crest smashed record high temperatures today as a Pineapple Express continued to pump extremely warm and moist air originating from the Hawaiian Islands into the region. The fact that today was relatively calm and dry definitely helped, as we were able to get a little more solar insolation and didn’t […]
