Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
What a beautiful day it is today! With a strong ridge of high pressure centered just off our coast, we have bluebird skies, light winds, and very warm temperatures, with many places around the Portland metro area making it into the 80s! This ridge will move right over us for Memorial Day weekend, meaning our […]
Our last (sniff sniff) day of storm chasing was significantly more relaxed than Thursday’s, but we still managed to see some well-defined mammatus and asperatus clouds, a giant wall cloud, some very strong straight-line winds, and the most amazing lightning storm I’ve ever seen in my life. Because Friday’s storms were much further south than […]
Even though it was nowhere near as active as forecast, day 6 was by far our most active day yet. We saw it all: a tornado, tons of wall clouds, an amazing shelf cloud, multiple funnel clouds, and we were pummeled by high winds, torrential rain, and hail on two separate occasions. The SPC homepage […]
With tornado activity well to our north yesterday, we decided to take a day off from chasing and explore Oklahoma! After sleeping in past noon, we decided to head east from Clinton, OK towards Oklahoma City and get some good southern barbecue. We stopped at Swadley’s Bar-B-Q on the western outskirts of Oklahoma City and […]
Our second day of storm chasing was definitely a lot more active than our first! We saw flooding rains, strong winds, lots of (presumably wind, possibly tornado) damage, a weak funnel cloud, several weakly rotating wall clouds, lots of “scud,” and even smoke from an oil tank that got struck by lightning. The storms started […]
After much anticipation, Joey and I finally saw some good storms on our third day of our storm chasing vacation! No tornadoes were in the cards for today, but we saw brief bursts of heavy rain, small hail, gusty winds, an impressive flanking line, and above all, very frequent lightning! We started out the day […]
Day two on Joey and Charlie’s storm chasing adventure was mainly a day of driving. After we finally arrived at our hotel at 3 AM Sunday morning, we slept in as late as possible and headed out just before our checkout time (although not before waking up early to gulp down the esteemed “Continental Breakfast”). […]
Hi everybody! This week, I’ll be doing something I (surprisingly) haven’t done before: tornado chasing! I’ll be chasing with Joey Sipos, a computer programmer/game designer (check out his latest VR game, “Glider Island”) and a fellow severe weather geek. Joey’s been chasing once, so I’m counting on him to get us perfectly positioned to […]
In the wake of the incredible thunderstorms many locations around the area saw Thursday, I thought I’d write a review on the amazing and very uncommon weather we saw last week. In the interest of time, I will spend relatively little time reviewing general thunderstorm knowledge, but if you are interested, you can read a 4-part […]
So many things to blog about… so little time. Today was by FAR the warmest day of the year for the Pacific Northwest. The Portland Airport hit 81 degrees, making this year the first year since records began back in 1940 that we’ve had an 80 degree high before a 70 degree high. Of course, […]
