Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
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. […]
Monday, February 8, 2016 4:59 p.m. We’ve seen our fair share of suffixes and nicknames for atmospheric and oceanic phenomena of all types these past two years. We had “The Blob,” a simple but very accurate designation given to a massive pool of warm water in the Northeast Pacific. We’re in the midst of the […]
Tuesday, February 4, 2016 4:25 pm A dreary afternoon at Cannon Beach, OR. Credit: Surflook Surf Cams Today was one of the grayer days I have witnessed in my 23 years upon this Earth. The skies were gray, the lake looked gray… heck, even my countenance looked gray. It wasn’t sunny enough brighten my mood, but […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Wednesday, January 27, 2016 1:41 am Yesterday, I wrote about the Eastern third of the country and how much of that region was profoundly affected by a major blizzard that halted over 13,000 flights and caused 3 billion dollars in damage. Now, the weather action has shifted back to our neck of the woods, and […]
Monday, January 25, 2016 1:24 pm A car submerged in snow. Photo taken 23 January 2016. Credit: Wikimedia User Aude Last week in Seattle was pretty stormy, capped off by a very wet Thursday storm that set daily rainfall records throughout Western Washington and major avalanche danger on the Cascades. However, this storm was just […]
Thursday, January 21, 2016 5:45 p.m. It’s been pretty wet today. I could explain it with satellite imagery, models, maps, and all that jazz (and I will), but all you really needed to do was to go outside and look at the size of the puddles, both on the road and off it. There was […]
Tuesday, January 19, 2016 1:42 pm Average precipitation anomalies from El Niño events. Credit: NOAA For winter-weather lovers and skiers in the Pacific Northwest, an El Niño forecast sounds like a death sentence. Such a forecast conjures up visions of no major windstorms, hardly any lowland snow, below-average snow in the mountains, and a “death […]
