James Jones

100% sleet!!!

A little wetter than normal in many places.

The situation is incredibly dire around here. We need rain extremely badly. One can only imagine the California wildfires being a small sample of what's going to happen here if this pattern continues through December.

Good lord, yet another ridiculous cold shot on the Euro. Let's hope it continues to notch a few hundred miles further west...

Ugh, you’re one of those drivers.

I prefer my drivers to crash.

Very impressive looking trough for early next week on the GFS.

23 of PDX's record warm September mins have come since 2000.

 

13 of OLM's have.

 

The warm years have been "warmer" at some locations.

Not sure how reliable the records are there but going back to 1929 at HIO, 16 of September's record warm mins have come in the 21st century. The record is supposedly 66 on 9/6/1958 during a big heat event, though that seems dubious considering PDX had a min of 49 that day.

PDX already up to 91 after a big bump of downslope. 

Let's hope we have 3 straight negatives in NDJ

Would be nice. Looks like no Nino this winter which is good news. I know Jim has been pimping that 1985 analog lately.

OLM this summer.

 

June: +1

July: +.4

August: +1.6

 

Taking UHI out of the picture, it's probably just been a slightly above normal summer for most of the lowlands so far. With highs running very near normal and lows running moderately above.

 

And near normal precip.

Been warmer down south. At HIO June was +1.9, July +1.0, and August +2.7.

EUG has seen +3.2, +1.1, and +2.1.

My ears got sunburned again.

 

Keep thinking I don’t need sunblock at this latitude but apparently my ears are fragile.

Don't know why you would think that. The sun angle today is equivalent to late August in DC. Unless you're at Hippa Island right now.

This summer has reminded me quite a bit of 2013 to this point. Consistently a touch warmer than normal but with very few days that are actually hot (hottest stretch that summer was back to back highs of 97/91 on 6/30 and 7/1). That year had 6 days of 90+ through July, this year has 5.

That was a special day! I forgot that Vancouver got to 107.

 

"But Sea-Tac wasn't even the king of the heat in Seattle. Boeing Field also reached 103, while it hit an amazing 105 degrees at the NOAA building along Lake Washington in Seattle's Sand Point Neighborhood.

 

Farther south, some spots were even hotter. Portland and Kelso hit 106 while Vancouver, Washington was the hot spot at 107."

Hopefully this upcoming ridge morphs into a August 1981 style monster so I can sit inside with my AC blasting all day!

I feel like we're a couple months away from Omegaraptor complaining about how stupid and annoying it is that days are always 24 hours long and that daylight always bottoms out on December 21st.

Using airport data since 1940, it’s actually 2.69”. Downtown is a wetter microclimate. The Tualatin Valley actually more closely resembles the airport. If I recall, Yuma’s record is around 3”.

 

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The airport happens to be in one of, if not the driest microclimate in the area. Most places average at least 40", downtown Portland for example averages 7" more than the airport. The daily record is completely unrepresentative of what this area is capable of as well, December 1882 had back to back days of 4.07" on the 12th and 6.68" on the 13th.

Tell them that they’re lucky Portland is as warm as it is being at 45.5°N latitude. If the Earth spun the other way, the PNW would have a climate similar to Hokkaido or Sakhalin.

 

Portland really is warm for its latitude. It’s on the west coast, influenced by a warm current, and its geographical position in a valley results in warm summers. If the Coast Range didn’t exist, we’d probably average in the low-mid 70s in summer.

If the earth spun the other way Portland would probably be a desert, and quite a bit hotter in the summer with much more frequent offshore flow/downsloping. Our summers are actually very representative of our latitude, winters however are not.

This July has been cloudier than normal as well as cooler in terms of daily highs by quite a bit no matter what way you slice it. GFS starts to turn towards average summer weather, which I suggest is a good thing, and for some reason you feel the need to paint me as a heat miser at every possible opportunity.

 

You literally treat every normal instance of spring/summer/fall warmth like it’s plutonium and I don’t ever call you out for it. I accept your climate preferences. You like cold anomalies, big deal. I don’t care. Different strokes. Yet for some reason you seem to be straight up offended by me wanting normal summer weather.

 

Maybe if you keep it up, I’ll start liking cool and cloudy “summer” weather! Hahaha, no. I have preferences, and you’re not going to change them no matter how hard you try. Don’t like them? Tough.

The weather the past few weeks has been utterly typical by pre 2013 standards, with the exception of the thunderstorms which were fun and exciting. A bit cloudier perhaps than the statistical average but it's very much been within the realm normalcy. More than anything the reaction to this stretch of weather shows how much recent summers have skewed expectations. 

I guess you were like nine years old in 2012 though which explains your lack of perspective.

The two sub-70 highs at PDX in the first 6 days of this month is one more than the last 7 combined July/Augusts. Goes to show the absurdity of recent summers, the last few weeks have been a very nice change of pace from recent years.

Probably gonna make up for it big time in late August/September but I'll take it.

The wild swings on the gfs are making me doubt the upgrade.

Not just the GFS, the Euro has been terrible past day 5 as well. It keeps showing heat in the 7-10 day range only to push it back on the next run (not that I'm complaining). No idea if the upgrades have anything to do with it though, could just be a difficult pattern for the models to handle.

I'm speaking for our area of course, the models might be doing a good job over other parts of the planet.

The last couple days have been fun, the storm yesterday was one of the longest lasting lightning/heavy rain events I can remember seeing here. I had about an hour of steady rain and totaled a little over an inch from it, along with frequent lightning. Had another heavy rain shower a bit ago.

Not having a panic attack. We've broken plenty of daily temperature records on the warm side, but we've broken exactly one on the cold side this year and that was the 37ºF high on March 6.

 

Also the 18z shows a 52ºF high in Bend on 6/20 which is right in daily record territory. 56ºF high in Eugene on 6/20 which is right in daily record territory. Pretty strong trough no matter what way you look at it. But I'm not complaining about it, especially since it provides a decent chance at some thunderstorms.

You should probably stop taking GFS surface maps seriously, they aren't worth much even 2 days out unless you're just looking for ballpark numbers. Let alone at 9+ days when it probably doesn't even have a decent handle on the upper level pattern.

Even at face value though it was nowhere near a record smasher. 

Personally, I am still optimistic that things will get better later in the summer. Hopefully as soon as July...if there's little rain between now and mid July, that will be no bueno.

I guess I'm going to have to see it to believe it. That did happen in July 2016 but of course we were going through a big ENSO shakeup at the time.

Everyone must panic!!

 

Despite everything still being green and wet and knowing the rains will probably return in August this year which is just a few weeks away. Going to try enjoy those precious few weeks without worrying about all this fear mongering.

 

Even July could be cooler and cloudier than normal.

 

As Cliff Mass said... drier than normal years happen and this is not a big deal.

 

Except on here.

Wet August? You say that every year and it obviously doesn't actually happen. Instead we get to enjoy about 6 weeks where we're choking in smoke.

Pretty obvious we're headed into yet another 2015, 2017 or 2018 type summer right now. The last few days were nice, I made sure to appreciate them knowing it's probably going to be months before we see that again.

F*ck Cliff. He made that post when it appeared more precip was on the way, anyway. Clearly that fell through.

 

I like seeing the “appeal to authority” logical fallacy on full display here, though. What the gives Cliff’s word so much weight? He has access to the same data we all do.

I've never seen a Cliff Mass blog post about warm season hot/dry stats where he didn't go out of his way to downplay it.

Yeah, but comparing modern PDX to old school PDX is also apples to oranges.

 

FWIW, the rural Battle Ground station didn't even see a top 10 warm May. Also not top 10 for Forest Grove. It was the #7 warmest May at the downtown station since 1973 (when they moved to the current location).

 

I think it's fair to say that PDX was a warm outlier for the area, in terms of historical anomaly. Not surprising, of course, but worth keeping in mind if we're tracking "top 5 warmest Mays", etc. It was definitely warmer further north, though, legit top 5 for many places in western WA and apparently BC.

Not disputing what you said but it should be noted that the downtown KGW station has been running ridiculously cool compared to PDX during the warm season in recent years. Here's the comparison for warm season 2018 but it's been the same story for years now:

Downtown KGW vs PDX:

May - 71.3/51.7 vs. 73.6/52.4

June -  73.8/53.8  vs. 76.2/55.3

July - 84.6/59.6 vs. 87.5/60.5

August - 81.5/59.8 vs. 84.3/60.0

September - 73.5/53.1 vs. 75.9/52.8

Don't know what's going on but I think it's more likely to be something screwy with the KGW station than a regulated, quality station like PDX. Increased UHI at PDX is definitely a factor but it's hard to imagine it being responsible for all of that discrepancy. 

To sum it up:

 

Variability until mid/late June, then a heatwave pattern as forcing propagates over the WPAC, then a crash into a 2011-ish pattern for a few weeks.

 

Analogs are indicative of another heatwave in mid/late August, but I can’t see that far ahead dynamically yet.

A 2011-like pattern sounds lovely, but I can't help but think your desire to troll Tim is clouding your judgement. Seems like every time you've forecast a cool period the last several warm seasons the best case scenario is that we get a brief period where we cool down to average or a touch below before quickly returning to torching.

My guess is we torch yet again this summer in typical 2013 to present fashion. I hope I'm wrong but predicting otherwise feels like a "too clever by half" move.

03-04 is my personal favorite.

From a meteorological standpoint there have been better ones in my lifetime but the context puts it over the top. I was 12 at the time and we'd just come off an incredibly dull 5 year stretch of weather that served as my formative years as a weather weenie, so having such a major winter weather event (the first significant snow event since January 1998) was almost impossible for my 12 year old mind to comprehend. 

So will this summer be most like 1954, 1983, or 1993?

 

So I actually did look into 1954, the year without a summer, and wow. There was no volcanism like in 83 or 93. The stars and molecules just aligned perfectly that year in a way that probably has a recurrence rate of hundreds of years. The same extreme troughing pattern just persisted for three straight months. The hottest day that year was 86 in mid May.

That summer was an astounding anomaly, only year on record to not hit 90 even looking at downtown Portland's records back to 1875. The warmest temp in all of JJA was an incredible 82. I wouldn't want a summers like that to occur often but it would be really interesting to experience it once.

I looked through the sky conditions during that summer one time and it was amazingly overcast, there were only a handful of partly cloudy/clear days. For the most part the best you could count on for sun was afternoon/evening clearing but that wasn't reliable. Tim would have completely lost his mind, 2010 was child's play in comparison.