Wednesday, March 23, 2016 2:28 pm Every year, around the first week of March, springtime allergies hit me harder than a bottle of caffeine pills. For the majority of the winter, I’m totally fine, and then suddenly, my eyes are the wettest they’ve been since stupidly eating some absurdly hot chili pepper in Indonesia. Ten […]
Everything You Need To Know About Gravitational Waves
Thursday, February 11, 2016 8:12 pm Although it has been my most enduring, meteorology was not my first foray into the natural sciences. When I was in preschool, I was obsessed with volcanoes and astronomy, two things I still love today. I clearly remember taking a trip to the “Big Island” of Hawaii when I […]
Major Inversion
Tuesday, February 9, 2016 11:37 am Right now, we have a pretty impressive inversion over our region. This was something I expected, and honestly, I was surprised that it was not stronger yesterday. It will weaken as the day goes on and the sun heats up the surface, but right now, it is quite striking. […]
Unstable Air, A Convergence Zone, And An AMAZING Satellite Picture
Thursday, January 28, 2016 9:10 pm Image taken at approximately 12:00 pm 1/28/2016 Credit: NASA Terra MODIS Satellite Apart from an extremely rainy morning for many folks, today ended up being a pretty nice day. Our atmospheric river that had been giving us so much rain, wind, and warm temperatures finally sagged to our south […]
Why Are Our Evergreens Turning Brown?
Thursday, October 15, 2015 3:52 pm Every autumn, our beloved deciduous trees shed their leaves, creating an annual economic boom for children everywhere as parents and neighbors pay them the proverbial quarter to rake excess leaves off their lawns. Of course, once these upstart entrepreneurs have reaped the monetary rewards of their labor, they get […]
A Supermoon Lunar Eclipse!
Sunday, September 27, 2015 6:03 pm Credit: NASA We’ve all heard of supermoons… after all, we’ve had three of them this year. The same goes for lunar eclipses… we had one this past April. They are both fascinating events. But what if you were to combine the largest supermoon of the year with a total […]
A Megathrust Earthquake And Tsunami off Chile!
Thursday, September 17, 2015 1:24 p.m. The port town of Coquimbo, Chile after the earthquake and tsunami. Credit: Wikimedia User Sfs90 Chile is hands-down the most active place in the world when it comes to megathrust earthquakes. Three of the past six megathrust (subduction zone earthquakes over moment magnitude 8) earthquakes have been in Chile, […]
Our Beloved Salmon
Tuesday, September 15, 2015 2:27 pm Things were never looking good for our beloved salmon this year. I’ve been a fisherman all my life (I actually just got back from catching a bunch of albacore tuna off the Washington Coast), so I care quite a bit about how our salmon are doing. First and foremost, […]
The Nepal Earthquake Part 2: Earthquake Types
Tuesday, May 26, 2015 6:38 pm On Good Friday, Mary 27, 1964, Southeast Alaska was rattled by a 9.2 magnitude earthquake with a hypocenter some 15 miles below Prince William Sound. The damage throughout the region was simply astounding. 4th Avenue in Anchorage was absolutely destroyed by the quake, but a couple buildings on the […]
The Nepal Earthquake Part 1: Plate Tectonics
May 7, 2015 12:28 pm I still remember the Nisqually Earthquake of 2001. Ironically enough, we had just finished an “earthquake drill” when our second-grade teacher shouted “Earthquake! For real!” We all immediately bolted under our desks, not necessarily because we were concerned about falling debris, but because we just liked bolting under desks. You […]