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He’s online now. Sorry for not checking in, have been dealing with a family issue in addition to a mountain of work. So my plate is full but hopefully the worst has past.

Beautiful frosty morning here with a low of 29.5.

Part of there not being wildfire smoke back in the day was based on fire suppression for nearly a century though. Now that’s caught up with us. We shouldn’t have suppressed what is unfortunately a natural process. Wildfires have been here long before we were here…since we suppressed the problem for so long now forests are primed to burn. Big problem that coincides with our warming/drying summer climate.

The first week of March is going to be up there with the big boys.

WOW

Maybe 70 by next weekend per 12Z ECMWF.

The classes i went to last summer talking about the Okanogan stressed how important the snow pack was going into spring because most fires up there spread on the ground and underbrush so a slow melt of the snowpack through April and may is very important. That wildfire 2 years ago opened my eyes and i wanted to learn more. At one point it was the largest wildfire in the lower 48. Keeping the underbrush down and trimmed is huge, we found a program where the forest service will pay us the clean our own property. they come out and look at the proposed area, we do the clean up and they come out and inspect and send the check. They pay 20 per hr for just a grunt and 50 per hr to a person running a saw. Crazy there are programs like that.

Pivotal added a bunch of new high res models.

11 degrees currently, low of 0. We came close to a subzero low temp, but didn't quite make it.

Welcome back! It snowed at my house, Phil!!!

Anyway, my snow is getting thin but I still have some! Almost to day 5 with snow on the ground!

We really did. At no point this winter was there ever a strong longwave ridging pattern over the West Coast. The warm patterns out here were from coast to coast SW flow-fests. The -PDO baseline held firm in that respect, and even Alaska had surprisingly low heights most of the time. And the only serious cold air intrusion that we did see into the lower 48 smacked us pretty squarely.

Lovely day.

We have talked about this a million times as well... but I think if we could be transported back to the mid 1800s we would be shocked at how smoky it was when western wildfires were allowed to burn unabated.

We are heading to cabin Friday, Going to be a snowy weekend at the cabin.looks like about 4-8 inches and the snow level stays below 3k feet, we are 3800. Hopefully the death ridge only stays a couple few days. It would be terrible to loose most of that precious mountain snow so early. I spend a BUNCH of time in the woods in the high country, much more than almost anyone on here and the snowpack issues are very noticeable. The Okanagan highlands are only about 65% and that death ridge will wipe out most of that snowpack much to early. March and early April are big snow months there above 4k feet.

Oh god I’m in for it now. I SWEAR I haven’t looked at LR models in 2+ weeks. Have no idea what’s going on! Might have to make myself scarce again until the next trough.

I feel like we have this conversation all the time leading up to the warm season. What happens leading up to the warm season…especially this early doesn’t mean that much for how bad the fire season will be. A warm dry spring overall can be a bad thing coupled with a hot summer. However it can be mitigated by late spring/early summer rain. Or lots of marine layer days throughout the summer and a lack of big offshore winds in early fall.

Very cold for march, Cabin was 28 yesterday and had a low of 2.1 above. That is almost the coldest i have seen in march there since i got the land.

Upgrades. 00Z ECMWF is solid.

Started coming out 1 hour earlier after upgrade.

Nice! Portland did 76 with that one. From way back then March-April 1885 has always fascinated me as well. Probably the ridgiest stretch we've seen recorded here in the early spring. And also after a very cold winter. Between March 12 and April 10, Portland only had 0.01" of rain with an average maximum of 67 and what looked like blazing sunshine most of the time. That ridgy stretch lasted until early May and culminated in a 94 degree day on May 5, which gives it pretty good heat cred even by today's standards!

Down to 19 now, 44/0 day.

May be tempting fate here, but March is one month where our heat benchmarks are squarely in the past. Portland did 82 on 3/29/1923 and 83 on 3/28/1930. Interesting thing is that both of those events came on the heels of frigid winters during a very blocky period in our climate history. And March 1941 was an absolutely coked up Nino torch. Portland's lowest maximum that month was 56, with the monthly average max at a brisk 64 and 8 days of 70+.

They finally got the 7 day change fixed for the ENSO map! Wowzers!

My sister in law's boyfriend's last name is Deatheridge. Seriously.

GFS looks farther west with the ridge... definitely cooler than last couple runs. There might not be any 60-degree heat to escape!

Hey wow, everybody say hello and welcome to the newest member of the forum!

We thought something happened! Nice to see you around

Reminds me around this same time in March 2020 when a warm spell was in sight and there was some shaming (from the same person) of people cheering it on because it was going to kill people. Pull whatever levers you can to guilt people. Parks are deadly on a 65-degree sunny day.

Some people enjoy throwing a lit cigarette out the window as well.

I80 Southwest Nebraska. Looks like winter.

Queue the Phil return.

There's a lot of people that would argue water isn't actually wet, but that it just makes other things wet. https://www.sciencefocus.com/science/is-water-wet

Gorgeous. I’ll be visiting my Dad in Port Townsend in a few weeks, hope to make a trip up there. I’m glad the Olympics will be getting so much more this weekend and early next week too.

They did this as far back as 2001, at least on the state level. Myself and a few others did some work up around my boss’ property at Alta Lake and there was reimbursement through DNR if I recall correctly. It went to my boss but he paid it forward. Worked out pretty well since that fire season took off like wildfire in August. All it took was one nocturnal dry lightning event that rolled up the valley and it seemed like the whole county was in flames.

Lol no I was saying 2011. Something like 2019 I feel like is the best we can do nowadays. Hopefully I’m wrong about that though. All I’m saying is an early March warm spell while not ideal for mountain snowpack does not mean we’re setting the stage for a devastating fire season. What happens later on will determine that.

I’m worried the snowpack will be quickly decimated this spring. We can’t afford a warm spring at this point.

Models are really digging their heels in for record breaking ridging starting later next week. Because when does ridging not bring record highs anymore? Could get pretty ugly. It’s a shame we couldn’t get to enjoy a typical March warm spell with some 60s to around 70. Right now upper air progs would support temps getting close to 80 at face value

Looks like I’ll get that early season melt off after all. I figure once all the forests burn down; then we won’t have to contend with a smoke season anymore.

It was insane back then. The winter of 1861-62 had a January actually slightly colder than Jan 1950, but Dec and Feb were way colder than 1949-50. The winter of 1879-80 is totally in a class all its own compared to any other we know of. From what I have been able to gather the entire winter had about 105" of snow in Seattle. The really cool thing is we even know how the two lows tracked that brought the monster snow in January. They both took the dream track for Central Puget Sound snowstorms and they were beasts. Everybody would have gotten nailed given the tracks of the lows. It appears an AR set up between the passage of the two beastly low pressure systems, and all hell broke loose. I could possibly know more about the details of that event than any person currently alive. A lot of material out there, but pulling it all together makes an amazing picture.

The winter of 1879-80 was an equally ridgy period for the southeast US. Then you have its inverse in 1861-62 out here. The more and more I read about it, the more and more it seems that the 19th century was a time period of midlatitude extremes overall. Or perhaps I am simply acknowledging the extremes you'd expect to see out of an entire century of weather across a whole continent.

December 1884 was insane. Without question the most bad azzz December on record. I'll have to look at the records I have for spring 1885 for this area.

We only got down to 25 last March and it was our coldest ever. Though we only had a few highs above 50 that month and measurable snow on 14 different days. 23 is about as cold as it gets here in March without a continental airmass. We hit 18 in March, 2019, but haven't been below 23 in any other March, we hit 23 in 2012 for sure, and I think another year, maybe 2018 or 2020.

They were closing parks and boat launches, roping off trails, it was pure insanity. I sure hope we learned something for when the next pandemic hits.

Then the whole thing with the murder hornets, still couldn't keep me inside! What a year.

Some people are obsessed with hurricanes and tornadoes too. People being fascinated by nature's extremes doesn't change nature in any way. No idea why it matters. I don't like extreme heat. But trying to control people's feelings doesn't change the fact that it happens anyways.

God that makes me sick just to think of that heat. 80 is one thing but 100 is insane. It would be like hitting 10 degrees in April, just insane.

Yup. I prefer Standard but we are too far north and I am too far east to have permanent standard time. Sunrises before 4am are a no thank you. That said, sunrises at 830 or 9am in some parts of WA in Dec with permanent DST are also horrible. We need the changing of clocks here.

Next weekend should be great. Hoping to Spring ski one day and golf for the first time this season the other.

Problem is that clear cuts and the undergrowth that develops under these young forests isn't natural so when a wildfire starts they have more fuel at ground level than they would under a old growth forest. The canopy was so high in those old growth forests that the fires had a harder time spreading.