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…
Well…that happened quicker than I might have predicted. PDX saw its first snowfall of the winter today, a whopping 0.1″! It’s actually the first time the snow station on Parkrose has ever measured any snow on December 4. We had a fairly marginal situation for snow today in the Metro area, with just some cool/dry east wind from the Gorge to provide evaporative cooling in the lower levels of the air. Temps were in the 33-35° range for most of…
It’s been a beautifully boring couple of weeks in the Pacific Northwest. Boring in the sense that there has been NO active weather since the first weekend of November. Beautiful in that we have seen tons of sunshine ever since then, with seasonably cool days and cold, crisp nights. As of November 18, PDX is running 4.0 degrees colder than normal, and most of the cold departures have occurred since the 7th of the month (the last day with measurable…
I just KNEW that if I planned to take a break from weather blogging, then things would suddenly become really active and intriguing. Now we’re looking at a very active pattern for the end of October & early November, with possible hints of unusually early cold next week. So a compromise has been reached: Only short blogs for the time being (less than 500 words) No more than 3 images per blog. After an unusually warm and foliage-delaying start to fall,…
Whew, what an unusual season it has been! As of October 19, Portland International Airport is running 8.7 degrees F above normal, by far the warmest early/mid October period in recorded history. Today, October 20, was the last warm day before cooler and wetter conditions arrive tomorrow. Yesterday was the last “really” warm day…at 75 degrees, it was 12 above normal and only 3 degrees shy of the record. It sure didn’t feel that toasty, though – at least not after…