1 hour ago, AlTahoe said:

They were talking about hotter summers leading to more forest fires. I think the temp of the summers doesn't really matter anymore. The forest are so overgrown we are getting explosive fires even when the conditions don't warrant it. 

There are a lot of factors seems like both probably play a role during the recent summers with lots of fires in the west heat and drought conditions have definitely warranted it 

11 hours ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

Salem had above average precip 2014-17, and was actually slightly above average in 2021. 

One of the reasons some of those years ended up below average up here is because the bulk of the precip came in the winter, we get a lot of precip in the spring here compared to the valley. So a parched May like we had in 2018 is only going to come in 1" or so below normal in the valley, but we usually get 5-6" of rain in May, so it's going to have a big impact on our seasonal total. 

 

Yep. Tim likes to make a big deal of wet years, but usually those are due to unusual wetness in the fall/winter, when people expect it to be wet anyway.

Euro still seems on board with zonal flow developing in the 8-10 day range GEM turned very wet starting well before day 10 

6pm sunset tonight

1 hour ago, Front Ranger said:

Yep. Tim likes to make a big deal of wet years, but usually those are due to unusual wetness in the fall/winter, when people expect it to be wet anyway.

Interesting.     So statistics don't matter and feelings are really the most important thing?   I will remember that in the COVID discussion.  ?    People "expect" fall/winter to be wet so it doesn't matter if its much drier than average or much wetter than average because rain is rain.  I mean... I get it.  I would personally much rather have Nov-March be the statistically wetter than normal portion of the year.    But the increase in rainfall is still interesting.    

Average annual rainfall appears to be increasing up here.   And summers are generally becoming warmer.    Those things seem to be true and in line with predictions of a warming climate locally.   

But we have also had some very wet springs in the last 10-15 years.   And even some wet summers like 2019.

Oof

I hope we do get more rain! February looked so bad. Looking at this 2013 was a bad year and I remember that was the first year I experienced with smoke in the valley for days. 

1 hour ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

Euro still seems on board with zonal flow developing in the 8-10 day range GEM turned very wet starting well before day 10 

12Z EPS actually backed off a little more on the wet weather later in the run... and the control run was fairly dry.    Also interesting to note that the cold shot in the middle of next week trended stronger on the ECMWF, EPS, and the control run.  

8 minutes ago, MWG said:

Oof

I hope we do get more rain! February looked so bad. Looking at this 2013 was a bad year and I remember that was the first year I experienced with smoke in the valley for days. 

2013 was very dry up here as well.     But 2019 was the driest year in the last decade... despite having the wettest summer.  

1 hour ago, Front Ranger said:

Yep. Tim likes to make a big deal of wet years, but usually those are due to unusual wetness in the fall/winter, when people expect it to be wet anyway.

Exactly. It was kinda like late last June during the heatwave. Yeah, it was 116 degrees outside, but that occurred at like 4:30 p.m. when people expect to be hot anyway.

Quite a distinct low moving ashore on the WA coast this afternoon... the spin is very apparent on the satellite and the radar.    

12z EPS

20 years ago right now it was coming.

Eps is rock solid 

12 minutes ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

Eps is rock solid 

That dip in the 850mb temps next week is becoming more pronounced.    Might be some low snow levels around Wednesday.

1 hour ago, Deweydog said:

Exactly. It was kinda like late last June during the heatwave. Yeah, it was 116 degrees outside, but that occurred at like 4:30 p.m. when people expect to be hot anyway.

Yeah, all-time record heat is very similar to a January with 10" of precip instead of 6".

Just now, Front Ranger said:

Yeah, all-time record heat is very similar to a January with 10" of precip instead of 6".

Summer is normally the warm and dry part of the year... so I guess it doesn't matter if its really hot and really dry according to your logic.  

1 hour ago, TT-SEA said:

Interesting.     So statistics don't matter and feelings are really the most important thing?   I will remember that in the COVID discussion.  ?    People "expect" fall/winter to be wet so it doesn't matter if its much drier than average or much wetter than average because rain is rain.  I mean... I get it.  I would personally much rather have Nov-March be the statistically wetter than normal portion of the year.    But the increase in rainfall is still interesting.    

Average annual rainfall appears to be increasing up here.   And summers are generally becoming warmer.    Those things seem to be true and in line with predictions of a warming climate locally.   

But we have also had some very wet springs in the last 10-15 years.   And even some wet summers like 2019.

It was a Tim take on a Tim take. I used the same sort of logic you like to use, only against you. ?

1 minute ago, TT-SEA said:

Summer is normally the warm and dry part of the year... so I guess it doesn't matter if its really hot and really dry according to your logic.  

That would be a more apt comparison than double d's all-time heatwave.

23 minutes ago, TT-SEA said:

That dip in the 850mb temps next week is becoming more pronounced.    Might be some low snow levels around Wednesday.

Plow stays on then! 

Three years ago today. 

Sun break!

Hail up in the SW hills. 

which anal logs have WW3 in them?

3 minutes ago, Phishy Wx said:

which anal logs have WW3 in them?

War Games was released during the spring of 1983. A real world -EPO nuclear winter exercise followed that December.

18z GFS operational is much wetter. Ensembles are much drier. Crap. 

8 minutes ago, Joshua Lake Oswego said:

18z GFS operational is much wetter. Ensembles are much drier. Crap. 

Go figure. Which is kolder?

14 minutes ago, Joshua Lake Oswego said:

18z GFS operational is much wetter. Ensembles are much drier. Crap. 

13 minutes ago, Deweydog said:

10 hours ago, TT-SEA said:

Interesting.    Your analysis does seem to make sense...  but the Fern Ridge station does not show the same trend.    Maybe that station has issues.    What does it look like if you use Salem or Roseburg?

This is Salem. Similar to Eugene, but not quite as neurotic. Not nearly as precip heavy from 1970-1996. Shows a smoother drying trend since 1996.

Roseburg has inconsistent data, so I excluded a chart for it. I could splice datapoints from the two different stations to "complete" the 1945-2022 timeframe, but that would defeat the purpose of testing station accuracy.

6 minutes ago, Meatyorologist said:

This is Salem. Similar to Eugene, but not quite as neurotic. Not nearly as precip heavy from 1970-1996. Shows a smoother drying trend since 1996.

Roseburg has inconsistent data, so I excluded a chart for it. I could splice datapoints from the two different stations to "complete" the 1945-2022 timeframe, but that would defeat the purpose of testing station accuracy.

How about Medford?

51/41 0.07”. 0.50” so far this month. 1 week ago it snowed…but it’s starting to feel like spring. Cherry blossoms on some of the trees and the days are definitely longer. 

1 hour ago, TT-SEA said:

How about Medford?

Spoiler alert: Medford is drier than Seattle. Always.

Medford annual precip has remained steady for years, with inconsistent inter-decadal peaks and troughs of ~10% deviation. They are in the midst of a dry period right now; whether that's part of a more long term trend or not is largely irrelevant to the departure graph above.

KSEA has better 'trendlines' in precip, over multiple decades, illustrating a drying trend from the beginning of its POR to the 80s, then an increase in precipitation since. Also, because Seattle's total precip is larger than Medford's, small deviations in % of KSEA precip express themselves nearly twice as much as they would with similar deviations in Medford's precip; since the departure graph is based on express water volume displacement, not proportions. Any 'trends' in Medford's annual precip are muted out by Seattle's. Essentially, it's a Seattle annual precip trend graph by proxy, albeit muted and warped.

tldr; Doesn't say much of anything. The two cities are too hydrologically distinct (and geographically isolated) for a useful comparison, let alone correlation.

In 1952, KSEA and KMFR almost meet in annual precip, entirely through how dry of a year it was in Seattle. Just 23.78", around half of what we normally recieve. Medford, in fact, actually had a somewhat normal water year in 1952, making the proximity in values that much more impressive.

8 minutes ago, Meatyorologist said:

Spoiler alert: Medford is drier than Seattle. Always.

Medford annual precip has remained steady for years, with inconsistent inter-decadal peaks and troughs of ~10% deviation. They are in the midst of a dry period right now; whether that's part of a more long term trend or not is largely irrelevant to the departure graph above.

KSEA has better 'trendlines' in precip, over multiple decades, illustrating a drying trend from the beginning of its POR to the 80s, then an increase in precipitation since. Also, because Seattle's total precip is larger than Medford's, small deviations in % of KSEA precip express themselves nearly twice as much as they would with similar deviations in Medford's precip; since the departure graph is based on express water volume displacement, not proportions. Any 'trends' in Medford's annual precip are muted out by Seattle's. Essentially, it's a Seattle annual precip trend graph by proxy, albeit muted and warped.

tldr; Doesn't say much of anything. The two cities are too hydrologically distinct (and geographically isolated) for a useful comparison, let alone correlation.

Thanks for the update.  

I realize they are very different in terms of climate... but one would think that a drying trend in Eugene due to the storm track lifting farther north as we speculated this morning would also be apparent in Medford.

Road into South lake tahoe will be closed for a bit. Cold inside slider followed by 60F weather popped some big rocks out at Echo summit today 

22 minutes ago, TT-SEA said:

Thanks for the update.  

I realize they are very different in terms of climate... but one would think that a drying trend in Eugene due to the storm track lifting farther north as we speculated this morning would also be apparent in Medford.

I thought that too… Though I might guess that Medford being so much further south means they have access to different weather systems (such as harshly cut off lows or errant AR’s) that KEUG northward wouldn’t have access to anyways.

After all, even during the driest years, where the storm track is nonexistant or shunted into Canada, there’s still always some baseline amount of midlatitude (non monsoon related) precip that falls in the SW.

Maybe after a certain distance south, the mechanisms that bring the PNW precip become redundant, and it’s mainly other processes, like cutoff lows, that bring consistent precip, which aren’t going away with significant frequency.

Though despite all this, the Rogue Valley isn’t exactly the desert SW. They have pine forests and are firmly in the PNW region, arguably a somewhat transitional zone, but not by a crazy amount.

38 minutes ago, Meatyorologist said:

In 1952, KSEA and KMFR almost meet in annual precip, entirely through how dry of a year it was in Seattle. Just 23.78", around half of what we normally recieve. Medford, in fact, actually had a somewhat normal water year in 1952, making the proximity in values that much more impressive.

1952 was remarkably dry at SEA, wow! Only about 1" of rain in November, imagine that! Although comparably Medford's 2013 is still more impressive. Medford's 30 year average is 18.43" so the 8.99" in 2013 is about 48% of average. That would translate into SEA having less than 19" in a year which would certainly cause many meltdowns on the forum (and maybe "burn-downs" everywhere else).

1 minute ago, Meatyorologist said:

I thought that too… Though I might guess that Medford being so much further south means they have access to different weather systems (such as harshly cut off lows or errant AR’s) that KEUG northward wouldn’t have access to anyways.

After all, even during the driest years, where the storm track is nonexistant or shunted into Canada, there’s still always some baseline amount of midlatitude (non monsoon related) precip that falls in the SW.

Maybe after a certain distance south, the mechanisms that bring the PNW precip become redundant, and it’s mainly other processes, like cutoff lows, that bring consistent precip, which aren’t going away with significant frequency.

Though despite all this, the Rogue Valley isn’t exactly the desert SW. They have pine forests and are firmly in the PNW region, arguably a somewhat transitional zone, but not by a crazy amount.

Great analysis.

I tend to think of real PNW storms usually bringing heavy rain down to northern CA.    There are many instances when a strong front comes through both Seattle and San Francisco.    

What about Crescent City... is there a noticeable decline in annual precip there?

35 minutes ago, Skagit Weather said:

1952 was remarkably dry at SEA, wow! Only about 1" of rain in November, imagine that! Although comparably Medford's 2013 is still more impressive. Medford's 30 year average is 18.43" so the 8.99" in 2013 is about 48% of average. That would translate into SEA having less than 19" in a year which would certainly cause many meltdowns on the forum (and maybe "burn-downs" everywhere else).

Jan 1953 made up for that, wettest on record with almost 13" of rain at SEA.

The most impressive 12 month dry stretch in history is March 1976 to February 1977. Not a single month with more than 3" at SEA, and wouldn't you know it, a wetter than normal summer.