BLI snowman

To paraphrase a certain Gopher State native from Januaries past: "60 degrees is never cruel!"

Locally here, May 2011 was historically cold while June was just merely chilly. June 2010 actually felt a lot colder than June 2011, though looking back there was only about a degree difference.

Check out May/June 1971. Seven record low maxes at SEA. And a couple of 59s in early July for good measure. What a time!

Speaking personally, I know I'm just that much more likely to do a 50 piece McNugget and large Peanut Butter Crunch McFlurry combo when I don't have a laser-eyed teenager there at the register to judge me.

Tim has had it so easy for so long.

Plenty of mid level clouds streaming in from the WNW over here. Has gotten noticeably darker in the last hour.

That's why they're installing kiosks in most of them. The days of the happy-go-lucky McDonald's cash register worker are almost over

Oh. Well hopefully that Nino-Costco magic strikes again with the strong Nina event this coming winter. Would hate to see something nasty like a Nino-Big Lots signature emerge.

Not really. It was never anything more than a very weak Nina to begin with, and the weather patterns remained remarkably consistent across the CONUS pretty much throughout so there was no discernible impact from any of the marginal SSTA warming in the equatorial Pacific. It will go down as a weak Nina cold season that for one reason or another had an unusually dominant grip on the weather patterns. Kind of the inverse of a year like 2004-05, which was only ever a very weak Nino but one which developed a solid death grip on the weather patterns nevertheless. It's cute that you're still so hung up on it, though.

The 2016-17 Nino is the stuff of legend. Amazing how we pulled that off.

12z runs look great!!!!!!!!!!!!!

If it makes you feel any better, there hasn't been a major U.S. plane crash since 2009. An amazing testament to how safe air travel has become, almost down to a science. The bigger picture shows that even with the questionable recent record of certain companies, the safeguards are overwhelmingly doing their job.

Funny enough, the last few big snowpack years in CA were all *drumroll... Niñas! 2010-11, 2016-17, 2022-23. La Niña truly brings the nourishing juices of life to all. Particularly to the Mid Atlantic states, where it allows the newly-native flora to thrive as it works to further expedite the transfer of the humid subtropical climate/bioregion into your neck of the woods.

Rang in with a nice line of strong to severe thunderstorms on the 1st and never looked back.

The cool and wet May is looking like the real deal, Andrew. Big Nino to Nina flips tend to equate to stunningly beautiful Mays. 1988, 1998, 2010. We're bound to see blessings, and a whole heck of a lot of them. You've all been warned.

Back to Hockinson!?

Niño climo in Phil's mind

Really only May 2022 stands out as cooler than average since 2015. May 2021 was fairly average temp-wise but also was consistently sunny and dry as a bone. Several historically warm Mays in that stretch as well.

August is definitely kind of its own runaway freight train at this point, but the whole May-August stretch has seen that broad shift towards warmer and drier. September is interesting in that it's at least maintained some productivity from a precip POV, perhaps owing to the inescapable change in wavelengths at that point which can reliably stick a few bullets in the summer pattern.

Recently I would say that the "start" of summer, if we're defining that as reliably sunny, warm, and dry weather, has broadly coincided with the annual death of the polar jet across the CONUS, which is usually at the very end of April or during the first half of May. Whereas in historic terms the PNW often keeps the cut-off low factory going well enough into June that spring-like climo still persists, with cooler temps and showery weather hanging around. Anecdotally it just feels like those patterns during that stretch of calendar have had a lot less teeth in the last decade while also being a little fewer and further between. Perhaps owing to the stronger flexing of the 4CH. In any case it seems pronounced enough to be a trend and it does feel like it correlates pretty soundly with our midsummer climate changes.

I think there is some conflation with "spring" and April. Spring also includes May, which has seen a distinct tendency towards warmer + drier than average since 2015. Including a solid handful of Mays in that timeframe (2015, 2016, 2018, 2019, 2021, 2023) where it effectively didn't rain the whole month across wide swaths of the region. You expect one or two of those per decade but the pace has really accelerated recently. The early part of spring has been pretty distinct from the latter part of spring when it comes to the departures from average, since March and April haven't seen a sharp statistical trend in that direction but May and early June (still more spring climo-wise) definitely have.

Speaking of seeing America, I visited the ghost town of Picher, OK on the back end of my eclipse trip. Really fascinating story there, with the lead/zinc mining deposits there creating an environmental catastrophe, and then sadly a devastating EF-4 tornado in 2008 pretty much finished them off. You can still see the giant chat piles from the road hanging over most of the former building sites.

Was going to go up there this same week last year but the road was actually still closed due to 2022-23's snow-e-ness.

A little early for the dry season to be starting. If I were in SE King County, I'd be getting pretty nervous about the prospects for a really wet Memorial Day to 4th of July stretch.

Not typical, but FL has seen some legitimate outbreaks in the past. February 1998 was pretty ugly in the Orlando area. February 2007 as well. Ninos enhance the southern jet obviously so there's a big correlation there.