December 2023 is now a wrap! I’m not going to do a year-end review of 2023 tonight, but maybe later this week…. Highlights: 1. December was extremely warm and quite wet! In fact the warmest at PDX in over 70 years. 2. We’re going to see a pattern change to cooler temperatures and lower snow levels, beginning this weekend and continuing well into the 2nd week of January. ….Let’s take a look at December first. There was a lot…
Hope you all had a very happy Thanksgiving! The weather sure has been quiet and beautiful. Yesterday Tuesday was the 6th consecutive day of mostly sunny skies for the majority of our region. Today the clouds moved back in on the west side. Daytime temps during this dry stretch have been near normal for most of us (upper 40s / low 50s), but nights have been very cold…about the coldest we can get without any arctic air at our doorstep. …
Happy Fall everyone! The past two weeks have been a classic mix of autumn weather in the Pacific Northwest: periods of rain and wind, some sunny days, and seasonable temperatures mostly in the 60s and low 70s. This is quite a far cry from last year, when summer-like conditions continued into the 3rd week of October. Leaves are actually beginning to turn on time this week as a result, and peak foliage in the lowlands looks to be only…
Pacific Northwest summers are generally boring from a weather geek’s perspective. Apart from the occasional thunderstorm or extreme heatwave, there’s very little activity going on…other than temperature fluctuations caused by varying degrees of marine influence in the western valleys. So I haven’t felt the need to post recently. On a personal note…I did make it back to Central Oregon last week for the first time since November; it definitely feels like my “home away from home.” Lots of sunshine &…
Remember the annoying cool & gloomy spring weather we had throughout most of March & the first 3 weeks of April? It is now but a memory. Our “La Niña Lag” has finally ended, and we are shifting into a warm springtime pattern instead. The past two days have been particularly glorious with nearly full sunshine and afternoon temps in the mid/upper 70s. Flowers and trees have finally caught up after a very slow start this spring! Here is a…
Anyone who’s been outside in the last few weeks knows that it has been a remarkably gray, damp & cool spring thus far in NW Oregon and SW Washington. This is wonderful news for the local vampire community. But for “normies” like myself, it means a bad case of seasonal depression. I’ve noticed that I handle the gray and chill just fine for the first 3 months (generally November-January here). By February I’m feeling a little antsy for spring, but…
Oops…we did it again! In recent years, Pacific Northwest winters have trended toward having the coldest & snowiest weather late in the season, in February and early March: late February 2011, March 2012, Feb. 2014, Feb. 2018, Feb/Mar 2019, Feb. 2021 and now late February 2023. Of course there was last April’s freak snowstorm, but I see that as more of a flukish spring event than an extension of winter. This never used to be the case; throughout most of…
Today is the last day of January and the third day of this winter’s 2nd cold spell. Granted, the days haven’t been extremely cold since the arctic front moved in Saturday night; every day since Sunday has seen daytime temps in the upper 30s/low 40s across the metro. But there were three freezing nights, with Sunday night and Monday morning the coldest. PDX bottomed out at 21° while VUO across the river dipped to 18°. Dewpoints got very low on…
Happy New Year everyone! The calendar has shifted from 2022 to 2023, and it’s time for a quick review of the past year’s biggest weather events. Of course our calendar system is very arbitrary and anachronistic, based on the dictates of the medieval European church; there’s nothing magical about the date January 1, roughly eleven days after the southern solstice. But here it goes: 2022 was a year of “unseasonable” weather, first and foremost. By that I mean that our…
It’s been a chilly December thus far! Through the first 15 days of the month, PDX is running 2.6° F below normal. That’s not wildly cold by any means; we’ve had no “exciting” weather save for a very marginal “conversation snow” event two Sundays ago. It’s just been very consistently cool the past 3 weeks; not a single 50-degree day since Thanksgiving! Most days have had temps in the mid 30s to mid 40s during the waking hours, with a…