Our consistently soggy and cool spring in the Pacific Northwest, has begun to break just a little bit. (Key term is “a little bit” as we will see!) Last Tuesday, May 2, The Dalles saw its first 70-degree high at the local airport. This broke the record from May 1, 1970 for latest first occurrence. The next day, May 3, was our first 80+ in The Dalles (86) and both the first 70 AND first 80 at Portland Airport, at…
Well…that was sure a depressing start to May! A high of only 60 degrees in The Dalles with cloud cover, and 54 at PDX. It was a rather cool weekend as well, though yesterday was quite a bit sunnier. I actually got cold yesterday evening at a potluck and bonfire party in White Salmon. About 50-52 degrees at 8:30pm there, with a biting wind. The last two years we did this, it was much warmer with evening temps probably close…
What a wet spring it’s been! After getting more than double the normal rainfall for March, we’ve pulled it off again for April. As of the 28th, 1.65″ have fallen at DLS, with little chance of more between now and Sunday night. That will make this the 3rd wettest April in airport history. More to the point: this spring has been consistently dreary and drippy, with many more rainy days than normal, very few sunny days, and NO warm spells. …
We are now well into the second half of the month of April, and there have still been no 70-degree days at Columbia Gorge Municipal Airport, also known as DLS. A little over a week ago, we celebrated the “Latest 65” milestone. Assuming we make it through tomorrow with no 70 (nearly certain), then we will be guaranteed at least the 3rd latest 70 on record, since the spring of 1949. It’s most bizarre that this is happening in what…
So the final numbers are in for the month of March. As you all know, it’s been a pretty toasty one this year, but I had no idea exactly HOW toasty. Our average temperature at DLS was 52.9 degrees F, with a high of 65.3 and low of 40.5! That blows away the old record from 1968 (52.0), and it’s a full 1.5 degrees warmer than March 2015. Most amazing of all was the fact that we had a seven-day…
March 2017 has been extremely wet across the Pacific Northwest, but it hasn’t been particularly cold. My forecast for strong, 2009/2012-esque cold departures ended up busting completely, and temps are running very close to normal for the month. HOWEVER…our extremely cold and snowy winter has continued to cast its shadow over early spring. Cold temps in January and February meant that the tree sap and flower buds weren’t able to get the kind of “jump start” they can pull off…
It was a beautiful early spring day in the Gorge for Equinox Eve: mostly clear skies, comfortably cool temps, and a dry and breezy east wind. Despite all the sunshine, temps in The Dalles were about 3 degrees below normal when you factor in both morning low AND afternoon high. The airport touched 57 degrees after a low of 32, but most spots in the Gorge topped out in the mid-50s today. Even the notorious icebox called Trout Lake, was…
I was just looking forward to taking a break from weather blogging when THIS has to happen: That’s a landslide on West Burnside, a couple miles west of Downtown Portland. The airport has seen nearly 2” of rainfall in the past 48 hours, on top of a very wet February / early March. So the water-logged soil is prone to landslides. Also…the rising snow levels and rapidly melting snow in the Cascades, valleys in the Gorge, the High Desert, Blue…
This is a posting of a blog entry from Facebook that never made it onto this site. My apologies…because it’s a good tale of what is still theoretically possible in our climate in March. ======================= Yup, it’s time for one of those dramatic forecast titles. For the past two or three days, model runs have been digging a cold and wet upper-level trough directly over us, beginning tomorrow Saturday and continuing through Tuesday morning. This time it happens to be…
The night before last around 12:30am, I noticed one or two lone frogs croaking outside, for the first time this season. It was still chilly and foggy at the time, more like an early winter day in Eugene than just about anything else I could think of. Then suddenly between 4:53 and 5:29am, the temperature at DLS airport jumped from 44 to 54 degrees, as a west wind kicked in at the surface. Yesterday was partly sunny, windy and very…