the_convergence_zone

My honeybees decided it's spring, they are going nuts today.

The PNW has a pretty awesome climate but the one cool thing we lack is severe thunderstorms. Like one that produces hundreds or thousands of lightning strikes instead of a half dozen.

There's a ton of evidence for positive feedbacks accelerating summer warming in this region. But the pace of warming over the past 10 years is pretty wild -- 1.5 C warmer than any previous decade (using upper-air obs which go back to the 60s, not sure how the 1930s obs compare). In my opinion, nobody knows how much we might fall back in a subsequent decade when there is a shift. Will we retain 0.5 C of summer warming? 0.75 C? 1.0 C? None at all? Or it could stay as warm as it has been or get even warmer.

Oh yeah, rough Euro run. The 12Z EPS has me more optimistic that it would only be two really toasty days.

I didn’t know they had records prior to 1894. At the Federal building?

Today was gorgeous. Did an 8 mile run at a pretty good clip and didn’t break a sweat thanks to the nice temps in the mid 40s. A little rain this weekend will feel good before we get an extended dry period. This ridge doesn’t look too bad to me, it’s not in the right spot to really torch.

Now is the time to get those yellowjacket traps out! Every queen you catch now is hundreds less yellowjackets in late summer.

This time of year it will do damage to the sun facing side. The SNOTEL sites are almost all in protected spots so it won't do much damage to the statistics.

I'm just glad we are nowhere near the North Atlantic.

The dice was loaded that year but sometimes the weather ends up cooperating. The odds were against that being a low fire year.

Do you have an example of one of these massive fires that we let burn? From my perusing of inciweb it seems like they always have at least some resources on them and there is always an effort to get them contained to at least some extent. I only recall seeing small ones in late season being left alone entirely. Fires like Norse Peak burned a ton of wilderness but they were still working that fire like crazy. Happy to be proven wrong on that one. Good to know about the controlled burns as well as the underbrush program that @MR.SNOWMIZER is describing.

Unfortunately, we're never going to let wildfires burn naturally, other than maybe a few tiny ones that are deep in the heart of wilderness areas. Even the tiniest possibility that they could threaten commercial logging lands or a single building is enough to send out the battalion of firefighters.

The somewhat reassuring news is that the climate models predict that spring will trend wetter with a warming planet. But that may manifest as deluges interspersed with torch ridges. And wet springs are known to be bad for fire danger as well, particularly in the grassy areas east of the Cascades.

There's a big difference between hoping for a few 62 degree days in March which we get almost every year vs. smashing all-time monthly records.

That’s why they invested so much money in the USCRN! https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/crn/ Ive been to the Lake Quinault one, it’s a pretty neat setup. The most exciting thing in Washington State is the massive investment that WSU AgWeatherNet is putting into building out a decent Mesonet. I believe they have almost 50 upgraded stations now and they are high quality instruments on par with ASOS stations.

Is there not a 72 hour rule there?

Most likely explanation is that area just has a crazy shallow inversion that only forms under the right conditions because it is just ever so slightly lower in elevation than surrounding areas. I used to live in Madison, WI and KMSN would behave the same way. Wisconsin doesn't have a ton of terrain but that airport was built on a swamp and even the tiny bit of elevation differences was enough. There were some nights in the winter where it would be like 10 F or more below the surrounding areas, especially if there was snow on the ground. Austin, TX is another airport with similar behavior although not as extreme. That said, I still give it like a 10-20% chance that something was up with the sensor.

It's nice that there's at least some chance of a storm getting through the ridge by the 20th or so. It's probably more likely than not given climatology.

I'm fine with a 2016 repeat if it means the warm spring is followed by a not-blazing-hot summer.

29.7 this morning. That's my coldest reading for March in 5 years of having a weather station.

Cold and sunny is awesome. Today was fantastic.

Terro liquid traps.

Looks like it is being undercut by the STJ at the end. Gotta keep the California Niño gravy train going.

The snow streak lives! That was so close to an epic surprise snowstorm last night. I ended up with 0.48" of liquid out of that band (edit -- make it 0.49, bucket tipped again as the slush keeps melting). Once it got going and the profile saturated, I sat right at 34 degrees on the nose with mostly rain mixed with slushy snow. Near the end it dropped to 33.5 and I finally had some nice aggregates. There was a bit of icy snow on the grass this morning but I'm calling it a trace. Interestingly, there wasn't any more snow on the top of the hill this morning, so it wasn't really an elevation thing, there just must have been an isothermal layer near the surface that couldn't quite cool enough. A few times I thought for sure that it was going to switch to snow and stay there, but the thermometer refused to budge. Ugh. You couldn't draw that one up any better for West Seattle winning the jackpot other than not being cold enough.

I run quite a bit on Cougar Mountain in the winter, that area gets dusted often but rarely anything significant. It does seem like 1,000 ft tends to be the snow line in this type of cold, onshore airmass. Wilderness Peak is 1,400 ft and sometimes I go there to get my snow fix if it’s raining in Seattle, but it’s usually just an inch or two. Squak Mountain at 2,000 ft doesn’t do much better unless it’s actual arctic air. As we were discussing the other day, the back side of Tiger Mountain does much better at an equivalent elevation where the cold air can stick a little longer, that’s the only spot where I worry about not being able to get through in running shoes.