Weather, Climate, and Other Science Topics
Snow is falling over Western Washington and parts of NW Oregon this morning. I’ve been riding the train down from Seattle to Portland and saw close to an inch in the higher elevations near Centralia. I’m now in Kelso and everything has switched to a cold rain, with no snow accumulation to be found. This […]
When most Portlanders think of December, they think of Christmas trees, advent calendars, and cars with those big bows on them. Certainly not sunny skies, and much less 50+ degree temperatures to accompany them! But that’s exactly what we’ve seen to begin December. There was no measurable precipitation for the first 5 days of December […]
After a brief break this weekend, the coming week will feature the classic quadfecta of winter weather: rain, wind, mountain snow, and big waves on the coast. As far as mountain snow goes, I couldn’t be happier, as I’m heading up to Whistler tomorrow and am looking forward to a snowy week up there. And […]
Thursday, September 15, 2011 4:05 P.M. I’m doing what would be Friday’s post today since I will hiking around Mt. Rainier tomorrow. We are now right at or just past the peak of hurricane season, and in a month or so, we should start seeing a more consistent flow of extratropical storms across the Pacific, […]
November 7, 2009 7:16 P.M. What is instability? I often mention instability as the cause of post-frontal showers after the cold front of a storm system has passed in the PacNW, but what does it really mean for the atmosphere to be unstable? It means that the atmosphere has a steep temperature gradient. Our surface […]
October 29, 2009 9:40 P.M. People have been begging me to do a forecast for Halloween, so write a forecast I shall .The good news is that Halloween should be fairly dry! But there could be a couple showers roaming throughout the area. Let’s talk about the first event. Tomorrow is a very, very big […]
October 21, 2009 3:38 P.M. Looking at the weather models this afternoon, I noticed that we could see our first flooding event of the season next week if the situation shown by the models comes true. Let’s take a look at the furthest time frame the extended WRF-GFS model from the UW goes out. This […]
