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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Is This Year’s El Niño A Bust?
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 […]
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Gigantic Pattern Change
Saturday, December 26, 2015 9:46 pm Hi everybody! I got back in Seattle late on the 22nd, and now that I’ve gotten through Christmas, I’m excited to start blogging again once more. We recently had a major, prolonged snow-producing pattern for our region. I actually went up to Snoqualmie Pass today for a job interview […]
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Why Did Yemen and Socotra Just Get Hit By Consecutive Tropical Cyclones?
Saturday, November 7, 2015 2:13 pm Less than a week ago, Cyclone Chapala slammed into Socotra, a small Yemeni Island some 150 miles east of the Horn of Africa, and Yemen, a small country on the southwestern tip of the Arabian Peninsula currently embroiled in a brutal civil war, becoming the first hurricane-force cyclone to hit […]
An Overview of Hurricane Patricia And Its Relationship To El Nino
Saturday, October 24, 2015 8:09 pm Visible satellite image of Hurricane Patricia at record intensity approaching the Western Mexico Coast. Taken October 23, 2015. Credit: NASA Terra/MODIS Satellite Patricia was the deepest cyclone ever recorded in the Western Hemisphere. Deeper than Wilma, deeper than Katrina, deeper than Camille, and far deeper than Sandy (all these storms […]
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What Was the 1997-1998 El Niño Like?
Saturday, October 17, 2015 4:01 pm Beach erosion by Pacifica, California due to storms during the 1997-1998 El Niño event. Credit: USGS With all of this talk about the “Godzilla” El Niño of 2015, it’s important to remember that an event of this magnitude is not unprecedented. Back during the 1997-1998 winter, we saw the largest El Niño on […]
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My Fall Forecast
Sunday, September 13, 2015 5:19 pm If you ask an astronomer when summer ends, they’ll tell you “September 23.” That is the date of the autumnal equinox, the date when the day and night are approximately equal in length (the day is always a couple minutes longer because the sun does not set all at […]
