The Ms. Anthrop

12 minutes ago, CliffMassYelledAtMe said:

Perhaps even worse than the "warm roads" was his dispute with the data from SEATAC. He says the air temp at the airport was reported as 31 degrees. He goes on to say that the airport reported an hour of freezing rain. He acknowledges that SEATAC is at a higher elevation than BFI and OLM, but then says that SEA's sensors may have been wrong. He also says that he measured the rain at HIS HOUSE and it was 35. But he doesn't live at SEA. In previous blogs he has mentioned living somewhere in Sand Point or nearby. Close enough to UW that he bikes (or used to bike) to work. Now, why would he expect that data from SEA to measure data at BFI or at OLM or at Cliff Mass's backyard? Isn't he the guy that likes to talk about how many microclimates WA has? I. Just. Cannot. 

His comment about the lack of freezing rain at Seatac and the faulty reading was a direct jab at Micheal Synder. In that spicy tweet fest from that night, CM was going on about how nothing was *actually* happening despite folks saying that it was. MS responded by pointing out that his weather station was showing ZR at his house as a WTF man... and of course, CM doubled down. 

2 hours ago, Cold Snap said:

https://x.com/seattlewxguy/status/1748094211398811816?s=46&t=wti5sHI_eE4tVdzY0rtEQA

I was literally going to say that this was a job for JAYA and Micheal Snyder, and then you posted this. Love it!

1 minute ago, Meatyorologist said:

My lawn is frozen solid

So is mine, still! There are still areas of ice/dirt crystals that popped up in the boggy parts of the yard when it froze over last week. So how on earth does a warm December play into this past week's ground temps?

This this the line that slays me, however-

So.... PSE didn't have a ton of outages? Traffic collisions don't count anymore? All those schools that opened late or not all the next morning equals very little impact? LOL no. Are we dealing with damage or scale that Oregon is? No, we are not. But to say that it was not freezing rain and that it had very little impact is just disingenuous. The only hot air in this tri-state region to occur this week came from Cliff Mass opening his dang mouth.  

1 hour ago, LowerGarfield said:

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Starting to get concerned about the ice tomorrow. Ice potential is going up and NWS Spokane is considering issuing an ice storm warning. A friend is driving to Spokane and back tomorrow to pick up the Floridian. Spouse isn't concerned because they have studded tires. But that can't really help much with ice, right?

Studded tires make a huge difference, but people often drive with them like it utterly neutralizes the ice. LOL it does not, you can still skid and have a massive shunt. Go slow, leave waaaaaay too much room to react, and be hyper aware of all of the bozos who think that their lifted 4wd truck means 4-wheel stop. And don't be afraid to stop for breaks because that kind of alert driving can be really draining.  

Hovering at 36 degrees in S.Seattle/Renton. We are getting both ice pellets and slush, which I haven't seen at the same time before. The persistence of this cold is something else!

3 hours ago, Skagit Weather said:

Went out for a run before the snow stopped. I love the colors of the water when the lowering clouds bring snow. Ended up with about 3” here and temperature has dropped to 31F with a light north wind.

Super gorgeous pictures, love seeing the ice chunks on the water in particular. Thanks for sharing!

Snowing/slushing in S.Seattle/Renton pretty decently for the last 30 or so, although not sticking. Topped out at 36, and now starting to drop again at 34.9. Me gusta!

4 minutes ago, RentonHill said:

where's that seatac flight upper air temp graph link

SeaTac TimeHeight Cross Section (washington.edu)

3 minutes ago, bainbridgekid said:

As a teacher, I promise you, so are we. I've had many conversations with my coworkers about how dumb that is and how largely worthless a suddenly thrown together singular online day would be.

I left education this last June, and yeah, it's ridiculous. I don't know what your district is like as far as pacing freedom, but for us we couldn't pause for a day and teach about snow, or weather, or something that would relate to what was going on. Nope, we'd have to stick to the guide. Half my class would be missing and the other half physically present but mentally absent. It would not be hard to have some really excellent snow day curriculum on tap that would be great enrichment for those who can/want to take part virtually.

3 minutes ago, MossMan said:

Ouch. Let kids have a little fun since it’s so rare to have a snow day. So dumb. 

LOL that is some serious snark from the comms person. Time to cue up the Pink Floyd, man... we don't need no education...
 

So took the dog out for a walk and stuck to the grass, which is still quite frozen. Water is just pooling up on the surface as it slooooowly thaws out. The sidewalk was slick as heck, and there is visible slush in the parking lot as well as patches of ice on the margins. It’s raining solidly.
 

Holding steady at 34 degrees, and we dropped right to freezing at 4am for an hour. I’m a block from Lake Washington, so I’m genuinely surprised how long this cold has stuck around for me.
 

What weather stations do folks use? I have a basic La Crosse station but am wanting to get something that gives me more than temps and humidity.

45 minutes ago, Phil said:

So was Cliff Mass right or full of s**t? Honest question as I don’t know the specific goalposts set for the squabble last night. All I know is he was taking a beating on here.  

He said that this was going to be an utter non-event and ice would not be forming. He was very, very, wrong. This is just one page of school closures out of like 6 pages for this morning. Even if you stick to the Seattle metro area, 90% of the districts are running late or are closed from north (Shoreline, 2hrs late) to south (Renton, 2 hrs late) to east/west (Issaquah closed, Highline 2hrs late).  While Seattle SD isn't running late (?) I took a look at their sub board and there are a metric ton of positions open so folks are not making it in. Clearly there was ice, and there was an impact city and county-wide from said ice. So yeah... Cliff Mass was very butt hurt on SM last night when folks called him out with actual on the ground data of ice, and didn't shift his "forecast". 

1 minute ago, TT-SEA said:

No Chris.   North Bend has to take of its own roads and they are bad at it.   Intentionally so because they claim it will cost more in road maintenance.    The line is drawn right at the city limit.   Literally. in all directions,   The county will lift its plows right when it crosses the city line.  

This is correct. NB doesn't contract with the County to plow their roads, so the KC plows go to the boundaries and turn around. Source: I work for the County.

Not the greatest picture, sorry, but we have a light glaze starting in my part of Renton/Skyway. This poor rhododendron was already looking rather Charlie Brown Christmas tree, and now has added shine The pavement is also developing ice patches in places, and the grass is still rock hard. It’s been raining steadily for the last 1.5 hours so we have some standing water as well. Been stuck at 33.4 for the last hour. 

1 minute ago, snow_wizard said:

I have no idea what he was thinking.  He knows evaporative cooling is a thing.

Does he though? Cause he knows roads are always warm and ZR isn't happening right now. I'm just saying...

10 minutes ago, Slushy Inch said:

“Old Man winter” has me dying with laughter 

Mmmm yeah that burn came from this playbook...

Which is ironic given the start of the thread with the KOMO meteorologist. Cliff Mass really needs a SM timeout. 

55 minutes ago, TacomaWx said:

Unfortunately it’s very unlikely anything but freezing rain falls with this south of Everett. It’s just too warm in the mid to upper levels to support snowfall. Up north it’s colder in the mid levels of the atmosphere which is why they have a good shot at some snowfall with this. 

Oh, I know that snow is completely out of the picture, I just want some sort of messy as heck transition between the delightful but useless cold of the weekend to our usual status quo of rain and 40ish... slush would be fine, or sleet. Even freezing rain at this point. Just a wee little glaze to make me feel better when I get the bill from the HOA for our busted pipes rather than the bupkis that we currently have. I mean, the ground is literally frozen and there are no sun angles and we still got nothing! A messy transition isn't too much to ask for, right?!?   

4 minutes ago, TacomaWx said:

Yeah, I could be mistaken but I believe the models a couple days ago were showing us closer to 40 degrees for a high today. Only maxed out at 35 as well. I do agree that the impacts will probably be more significant than 0.1” or less of ice. 

We shot up pretty quickly to 36.8 today, hovered there for an hour, and now have started to drop back down. I really thought that we were going to hit 40 and this was going to be non-event. Given how cold the ground is and where the temp is now, I have some faint hope that we will see something come out of the sky that is not rain especially if the evaporative cooling tanks things. 

50 minutes ago, Lars43 said:

Sitting at 24, rain has started. It’s an absolute glacier. 

 

Man, all that surface needs is a couple of quick passes with a Zamboni!

58 minutes ago, Blizzard777 said:

Ugh!!!

I have a heater out there along my line right now as my emergency shut off valve is frozen currently, downstream from my fix (which I had put in last time where my pipe bursted 17 years ago) .  I’ll go without water for a bit and make sure everything is thawed before I turn back on. Otherwise I’ve moved onto getting the water damaged stuff out of garage.  Good times.

Hope yours didn’t do any major damage and hang in there

Good luck to you as well, I hope you've got it mitigated and fixed!

Ours is going to be quite expensive, me thinks. There was definitely a leak in the control room because the spray of water took the fire control panel out; the FD finally just turned off the alarm a couple of hours ago so they don't have to come back and check it every time. And as the fire suppression system is totally off, it means that we get to do hourly "fire watch" checks of the building. Other than that, we don't know if any of the other pipes have been affected... which worries me greatly given we don't know when we can get someone in to check. Oh, and the HOA president is out of town so it's me and couple of other folks trying to bodge together a fix. LOL good thing I have an excellent homeowners policy with USAA. 

All this hassle and no snow to show for it. Not sure I want mother nature to throw us the bone of an ice storm at this point. BOO. 

24 minutes ago, bainbridgekid said:

Made this which should help explain it a bit.

 

That is awesome, thank you so much for taking the time to make it! Seriously, I really love lurking in this forum- with all of the debating back and forth everyone does I've learned a ton, and I really appreciate how well ideas are explained (or picked to shreds lol). 

Alas, you can add me to the broken pipe brigade. Fire alarm has gone off 4 times in the last hour as we climb above freezing in my condo building. One of our sprinklers has busted. Right now hoping that it's just one of the exterior pipes going from the control room, but we will only know for sure as we thaw out and when we get a plumber in. lol @Blizzard777 if your fix holds, you want to make some extra money by coming north and soldering ours?  Goodness knows when we will be able to get someone out to look at it...

Already 32.9 in Skyway, le sigh.

22 minutes ago, the_convergence_zone said:

It's basically a time-height plot of temperature and wind. This is an aggregation of data from commercial flights approaching and landing at Sea-Tac. Note that the newer times are on the left. And it's in UTC, so the 1617 column is the 9 AM hour. 

One can use it to compare to model data or just watch the trends of that warm layer. 

19 minutes ago, MR.SNOWMIZER said:

As the plane comes down it is taking temp readings at different altitudes, far left is feet and mb pressure, 925mb is 2500ft and 850 is 4800ft. You want to see the entire air column below or at zero c for snow, However low dewpoints in these areas can cool when precip falls through it. Very touchy forecast. As you get closer to the mountains sometimes there will be cold domes of air trapped that can support snow.

Thank you both for the explanations, they are super helpful! 

13 minutes ago, the_convergence_zone said:

It's a good day to be watching aircraft temperature data from Sea-Tac: https://a.atmos.washington.edu/marka/tha.cgi?sea

7 minutes ago, MR.SNOWMIZER said:

Very interesting. 

Can either of you help me decipher this a bit? LOL it's a bit advanced for dangerous dilettante level understanding I'm still at.   

3 hours ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

I dare you to get on the YOUTUBES and watch Michael Jackson's 1993 performance. Talk about a GOAT. 

Late to the convo, but while it's a dang fine show, Prince in 2007 is what gets me- Purple Rain in the Rain? Chills every time. Wasn't a Prince fan before I watched it, was after. 

We had a solid sheet of ice on the pavement this morning, but no snow left on the ground at this point. Got a late start out of my school district however and that's always appreciated. Will be curious how cold it gets tonight- it's already down to 38. 

6 minutes ago, TacomaWx said:

Lol of course I’m gone from home and a snow event happens. 

We thank you for your sacrifice! Let us know when you've planned next year's vacations  

4 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

I think Dec 1990 may have been the thundersnow.  Feb 1989 wasn't really the right situation for it.

That's entirely possible- I want to say that it was either November or December, but for sure before Christmas. LOL my dad was keeping my present at work to hide it from me and that surprise (a hot wheels car wash that you could put real water in!) was dashed.

Down to 36.1 and slushing. 

21 minutes ago, MossMan said:

Amazing catch!! 

Thank you! LOL as you can tell I'm more than a little stoked by getting that combo on video. We so rarely get decent thunder storms here that I figured that it was all over by the time I got home and set up my camera. I'm so glad to be wrong!

Can anyone remember our last properly winter t-storm? There was a storm when I was young- 89 I think?- when we had real thunder snow. It was that storm that caught folks by total surprise as the day wore on. My dad and I got stuck at 4th ave and Airport Way on a Metro bendy bus that jackknifed about 4pm; we had to walk back to his work in SODO and spent the night sleeping in his office. As we were walking there was thunder snow, and that event is what sparked my interest in weather.