Meatyorologist

4 minutes ago, Phil said:

As a low frequency tendency (100-day running mean in this case), probably something like that. It’s going to be warm almost everywhere, I suspect.

Keep in mind this is only the low frequency component. There will be much more variability from week to week in reality. 

I'm kidding. Hopefully we're spared here west of the Cascades.

Just now, Phil said:

2024 still looks like an epic year for heat misers in the US. Good chance it will be the warmest year on record for the lower-48.

Dr. Roundy’s low frequency analog composite now projects a sprawling dome of high heights (warm/dry) smack dap in the middle of the continent. Wobbles east/west but largely stays put. The Midwest looks like ground zero for hellfire.

https://www.atmos.albany.edu/facstaff/roundy/waves/analogs/analogslp.html

So a big 'ol bowling ball trough parked over Minneapolis from May through October, understood.

47 minutes ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

Are you gonna try to see the eclipse?

Nah. I'll try and make Iceland though

I'm in debt with a broken car. Am I still legally allowed to enjoy the weather? Or do I need to apply for a permit?

Minneapolis hadn't set a monthly record high since 1999, until they did it twice in the span of six months, both last September and now this February.

7 minutes ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

So is this supposed to change my opinion or something? Or make his more right?  

I suppose I could quote those earlier posts you were so enamored with and say nobody cares, but that seemed needlessly d*ckish.

You went back and saw which posts I liked? On your own time?

19 minutes ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

So wonderful to have another active poster here who’s completely in love with/blinded by their own preferential dogma.

I agree with him. rain can make things miserable outside. still like it from time to time but it's really a fall/early winter vibe thing for me

Thunderstorm heading into Olympia!

7 minutes ago, GHweatherChris said:

I have just a bit of it, but my body has been fighting it like the plague apparently, so glad they found it after my heart attack scare and treat it, but I got other shite going on that needs to be addressed now besides that.

Glad you have a game plan moving forward at least. Only route is upwards. Good luck Chris.

8 minutes ago, westcoastexpat said:

I wouldn't trust the balmy operational GFS - ensemble support is certainly there for a troughy, cool stretch to start April.

Lots of spread dependent on how harshly the GOA trough cuts off in the midrange. Most solutions are less aggressive and sweep it into the area cleanly from the NW... Others go a little cookier in the Pacific and pop up a ridge of varying degrees right overhead. It also seems that the ridger solutions stay warm for longer or maybe even potentiate further amplification of the ridge in the longer range, while the cleaner NWly solutions generally continue the NW flow.

Nice cell to the west of Eugene.

That's intense for a lee cyclone... Tight gradients all across the central US and into the intermountain west. Technically out to sea too given the intense anticyclone offshore from California, if you wish to partially attribute that to the cyclone as well.

Sometime back in Summer 2011 we had a surprise morning midlevel thunderstorm above the marine layer. I was in summer camp at the time. We were walking our way to John Rodgers elementary, when just as we were approaching the building we started getting dry air bolts of lightning, no more than a mile away. It was crazy since there was literally zero rain, and the sun, while blocked behind the stratus, was out of the way of the midlevel clouds, so it still looked like a perfectly normal Summer morning. Just a brief lightning barrage then back to our regularly scheduled programming. Wethre is weerd sometimes

16 minutes ago, Cold Snap said:

I remember in September 2019 seeing a bolt of lightning strike a tree less than a quarter of a mile away. Loudest boom of thunder I have ever witnessed in my life probably.

Back in August 2018 I was on a Mississippi River cruise in New Orleans when a band of thunderstorms stalled over the city. One lightning bolt struck the front face of the levee exactly where I was looking. That thunder shook my chest... Amazing stuff. That storm ended up making for the worst flood in DT New Orleans since Katrina. Drove back to my cousin's house through streets flooded with 1-2 feet of water. The parking garage we parked in echoed the constant CG barrage that was occurring right overhead, and the manholes on the street had geysers due to the water overload.

Got a little band of weak early Springtime convection heading into Seattle. Should be a quick spurt of heavy rain and a 5F temp drop, maybe some wind. Starting to get the kind of sun angles now that bring in convective prospects under BSF.

5 minutes ago, Phil said:

Entire household has been coughing for a few months now so decided to look in the ductwork.

Oh.    My.    Fooking.    God.

Yes, that is all mold. Underside of every vent in the house is smothered in it. Must be in the HVAC system. Can’t believe I’ve been breathing this shit in for god knows how long.

eeewwwwwwwwww!!

4 minutes ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

Wouldn't that be such a blessing. 

Love cool Aprils. Usually sunny and Spring-y with lots of fun convection. Speaking of, the next couple weeks would be a killer thunderstorm setup for the PNW in July, specifically given the pattern over western North America.

I'm feeling cool April vibes this year. They usually come in chunks w/ -PDO regimes like the one we're in. Chances are next Spring will also be cool w/ this impending Niña potentially still breathing by then. After that it could be another 2-3 in the next half decade or so before April troughing goes into remission once more.

18z GFS is the most neutral possible solution for Seattle. A balanced mix of warm, cool, sun, clouds, rain, and wind. Spring climo.

38 minutes ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

There are plenty of years our warm and dry season ends with a stratiform rain event too, though. I’d say more often than not.

I tend to notice petrichor most after 3-4 day+ warm/dry periods in the mid spring through early summer though, whether the rain is stratiform or convective. I think the smell has a lot to do with plants and the chemicals they are producing in response to rainfall, or perhaps more precisely how these latent chemicals react when exposed to water.

I'm not supposing that the means by which precipitation occurs matters. My point is that the association between petrichor and convection in the PNW makes some sense since our most memorable storms tend to occur during the dry season, when there is an abundance of petrichor-causing chemicals laying about. Also, our lightning storms often occur on the back end of heat waves, after multiple days of dry, warm weather, so they're often by their own nature primed to be aromatic.

54 minutes ago, Phil said:

Does convective rain smell different than stratiform rain?

Petrichor is most often a convective phenomena here as the only time it rains after a long stretch of dry weather is during the Summer and early Fall, when our big thunderstorms usually show up.

3 hours ago, Phil said:

Last June looked like that here, the blood orange sky with the sun obscured. Hope I never experience it again. That wood/smoke smell got into the carpets and everything, took weeks to eliminate it.

Apparently today there were 12 fires within 75 miles of here. All sparked by downed power lines in the mountains (downslope windstorm). Gusts up to 77mph were measured immediately downstream of the terrain.

Didn’t get quite that windy here (maxed at 45-50mph) but there was enough smoke that it looked like rain on radar. Talk about a crazy deep boundary layer..temp reached 70°F despite vigorous CAA (850mb temps near 0°C). Dispersion was maxed out.

I'll say! How does this happen? Mixing in the lee of the Appalacians?

10 hours ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

Living here and hating 35-45 degree drizzle is kind of like living in Florida and hating thunderstorms

k

1 hour ago, Sunriver Snow Zone said:

A disgusting 45 degrees here currently, 71/21 day. Probably won't get any colder than maybe the low 30s tonight.

Wild spread.

8 hours ago, iFred said:

It's my third favorite too.

The month of Nor'easters in March 2018 is my favorite winter event of all time, followed by December 2008, followed by the Blizzard of 16, followed by the Ice Storm of 96 followed by November 2006 (that whole winter was fun), followed by November 2010, followed by the weekend storm of January 2012.

In my early twenties I would get sent into a little bit of a spiral thinking how if you go onto WeatherSpark, you could visualize the dozens of times that Seattle saw more than three inches of snow recorded on any day since 1980. It made me think that living out here, I would statistically would only see a regional multi day event once every fifteen years. Throw in all of the smaller events, it amounted to three weeks of snow cover for every ten years (I did the math on a spreadsheet back in 2010 or 2011 and cant find it). Add in some variance by including days where the high was 37º and under, you were looking at 45 days of solid winter for every ten years, 60 if you did sub-40º. In that period of "artistic" obsession, I found that Chuckanut Mountains served as a divide for climate, plant hardiness, average snow school days, and total snowfall. It seemed that every value that I valued for winter had doubled, the number of days below 40º, the number of days with snow on the ground, the number of BC licence plates in the Costco parking lot, all doubled. As a single man, living by himself, and working nights in tech, I had days and days to pour over these spreadsheets trying to optimize where I should live in Western Washington to get the most amount of snow and cold in the winter. Then I snapped.

Our climate in the lowlands is capable of those top tier storms that will even get Jim Cantore to risk his life to come out here and stand on the Pine St overpass in Seattle has heavy flakes come down. One read of Storm King and you get the idea why. That said, I have learned to love and embrace our landscape and climate as is. It is pretty unique and worthwhile in its own right. We have some of the most amazing rainstorms, giving us an opportunity to sit by a window with a hot cup of coffee and gaze out into a dark landscape partially illuminated by a warm glow of surface lighting. Our windstorms can be otherworldly, each sixty mile-per-hour gust at night bending back the boughs of the tree like a worn out toothbrush, scraping against a night sky eerily illuminated by the fast moving and low cloud deck, flashes of bright blue light in the distance, further highlighting the tendrils of vapor that try to escape the underside of the storm. Inversion season here might be one of the most widespread, long-lasting, and intense occurrences in the western hemisphere, with what seem to be days of near freezing and some valleys around collecting enough rime ice to make a snowball with. Our summers, aided by our high latitude and peaceful summer ocean, are easily the best in the entire nation, two to three solid months where the skies are absolutely clear, the temps above 70 but below 90, an enough humidity in the air to keep your lips from chapping, but not too much that you can go outside and enjoy a brisk walk, and how the summer twilight just seamlessly blends from sunset to moonrise, bright blue to black, all in a three hour long curtain drop, revealing absolutely beautiful night skies.

Maybe this is cope, it probably is. I still have dreams that my wife is suddenly ok with moving to Boston or New York, and am nothing short of ecstatic, mostly because of the weather I'll get to experience. If this is all just me hitting that final stage of grief, I'm ok with that. A lot more in my life that I love about the place I live in than just the weather, but the weather is still a big part of it.

Sort of my perspective too. I've found that community and things to do are what really drive happiness. Our climate is comically pleasant to live in, though I will say the 35-45F temps with drizzle kind of sucks. Just commit to freezing temps and snow already. Or resign to something warmer. Ah well.... I was only born here, gotta figure out a way to love it all.

Storm King will happen again. It's pretty much inevitable.