March 2024 Weather in the PNW

[TT-SEA]

1 minute ago, BLI snowman said:

8 hours without a post is pretty close to a record.

Analogs?

Not much to talk about... except lots of climo.  

[TT-SEA]

If even half of this verifies it will be pretty crazy for the Twin Cities over the next 5 days.     They might go from record low snow all winter to reaching their annual average in late March.  

[SouthHillFrosty]

16 minutes ago, TT-SEA said:

If even half of this verifies it will be pretty crazy for the Twin Cities over the next 5 days.     They might go from record low snow all winter to reaching their annual average in late March.  

Where is the Twin Cities on this map?

[SouthHillFrosty]

Gorgeous morning for March Madness

[TT-SEA]

2 minutes ago, SouthHillFrosty said:

Where is the Twin Cities on this map?

Do search on Google maps.  

[MossMan]

35 minutes ago, BLI snowman said:

8 hours without a post is pretty close to a record.

Analogs?

March 1949! 

[bainbridgekid]

15 minutes ago, SouthHillFrosty said:

Where is the Twin Cities on this map?

It's the 30.3" just West of where Wisconsin cuts into Minnesota. 

[MossMan]

14 minutes ago, SouthHillFrosty said:

Gorgeous morning for March Madness

A little different up here. 

[westcoastexpat]

Looking ahead, here are the April, May, June and July anomalies forecasted by ECMWF's long range prediction model 

[westcoastexpat]

And here are the JJA temperatures anomalies from the CFS

[MossMan]

1 minute ago, westcoastexpat said:

Looking ahead, here are the April, May, June and July anomalies forecasted by ECMWF's long range prediction model 

Red! 

[westcoastexpat]

General sense seems to be warm spring and NORMALish summer!?!!

[Sunriver Snow Zone]

13 minutes ago, westcoastexpat said:

General sense seems to be warm spring and NORMALish summer!?!!

Warm spring and normal summer sounds perfect to me.

[TT-SEA]

I wonder what those maps looked like in 2022... when we had a full Nina year and we were talking about 1999 or 2011 type summer on here.    And then we ended up ridiculously warm and dry for 5 straight months.   Summer seems to be warm regardless of ENSO or anything else lately.  

[TigerWoodsLibido]

1 hour ago, SouthHillFrosty said:

Gorgeous morning for March Madness

Hell yeah! Some of the best 2 days of the year.

[Port Angeles Foothiller]

10 minutes ago, TT-SEA said:

I wonder what those maps looked like in 2022... when we had a full Nina year and we were talking about 1999 or 2011 type summer on here.    And then we ended up ridiculously warm and dry for 5 straight months.   Summer seems to be warm regardless of ENSO or anything else lately.  

That was a LONG dry spell. My first rain didn't come until Oct 22nd. Then I had snow 2 weeks later and a ton of tree damage due to trees still having foliage. 

[BLI snowman]

1 hour ago, MossMan said:

March 1949! 

0 posts on the forum that month. Folks were pretty quiet. 

[TT-SEA]

Weekend looks decent on the ECMWF.    Partly sunny Saturday and becoming mostly sunny on Sunday with highs in the mid to upper 50s in the Seattle area.   Deformation band on Saturday afternoon is up around the Canadian border per the ECMWF.   This weekend will probably end up being much nicer than it seemed a few days ago when the models were much colder and wetter with even a chance at lowland snow.    

[Cascadia_Wx]

Up to 54 here after a very mild low of 49. The next 3-4 days have gone from looking like a sort of chilly and active answer to our record breaking heat ridge, to a mildish and cloudy-ish purgatory. I guess the GFS wasn’t overcomplicating things when it decided to dig that cutoff offshore.

[Cascadia_Wx]

Notice California continues to get a lot of rain on the 12z Euro. Good to see. Decent snows for the Cascades too, including the Washington Cascades which need it badly.

[Cascadia_Wx]

22 minutes ago, BLI snowman said:

0 posts on the forum that month. Folks were pretty quiet. 

The Silent Generation.

[the_convergence_zone]

Nice to catch a bit of sunshine today. All of this green will look good with a soaking rain. 

[TT-SEA]

12 minutes ago, the_convergence_zone said:

Nice to catch a bit of sunshine today. All of this green will look good with a soaking rain. 

Totally agree.   Very pleasant today.  I guess climo is purgatory though. 

[TT-SEA]

4 minutes ago, bainbridgekid said:

Wouldn't be March Madness without a school we've never heard of beating a tournament stalworth. Duquesne University over BYU!

Eliminated 73% of brackets from perfection with one game!  

[RaleighHillsRunner]

1 hour ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

Up to 54 here after a very mild low of 49. The next 3-4 days have gone from looking like a sort of chilly and active answer to our record breaking heat ridge, to a mildish and cloudy-ish purgatory. I guess the GFS wasn’t overcomplicating things when it decided to dig that cutoff offshore.

Great morning out there - cloudy but still bright, not too warm.

Models seem to be waffling a bit, but that Wed/Thur low looks fairly potent  

[Cascadia_Wx]

1 minute ago, RaleighHillsRunner said:

Great morning out there - cloudy but still bright, not too warm.

Models seem to be waffling a bit, but that Wed/Thur low looks fairly potent  

I’m hoping we can get some good mountain snows and cooler temps to close out the month, but the trend in the models right now seems to be to water down cooler weather once it gets within 3-4 days.

[Phil]

13 hours ago, Meatyorologist said:

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

Yes, downsloping off the appalachians warms/dries/deepens the boundary layer. Combine that with CAA, pressure rises, and springtime solar heating, and we can occasionally transfer momentum straight down from 500mb in extreme cases (usually in April). Yesterday was actually run of the mill for a downslope day.

This is the reason extreme cold rarely makes it east of the apps. Not only is the low level cold neutered by the terrain, but it’s f**king impossible to decouple at night. The winds will rage nonstop, even under clear skies. Best overnight lows happen when the cold airmass has begun departing.

And it’s also the reason summer “cold fronts” (lol) usually either stall at the Allegheny Front or simply become dry fronts east of the terrain, only dropping dew points but not temperatures. Which is welcome, but meh.

 

[Phil]

13 hours 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’d never heard that word until today. Is that what people mean when they say it “smells like rain”?

I figured that fresh, earthy scent was just water in the air. But now that I think of it, I don’t usually smell it in the winter. But it’s always present in the summer.

[Phil]

Ozone has a distinct odor that I’ve only smelled after a barrage of close lightning strikes. Never smelled it ahead of a storm or even during most storms.

[Phil]

2 hours ago, TT-SEA said:

I wonder what those maps looked like in 2022... when we had a full Nina year and we were talking about 1999 or 2011 type summer on here.    And then we ended up ridiculously warm and dry for 5 straight months.   Summer seems to be warm regardless of ENSO or anything else lately.  

In 2022 the euro seasonal projected a stout 4CH/death ridge centered over the intermountain west. Same with 2021.

I think the difference in the models this year is because 2021 and 2022 had warm off-equator SSTAs (hence more convection in subtropics) while this year has (relatively) cool off-equator NPAC SSTAs, which constrains the ITCZ meridionally. 

[MossMan]

13 minutes ago, Phil said:

Ozone has a distinct odor that I’ve only smelled after a barrage of close lightning strikes. Never smelled it ahead of a storm or even during most storms.

[Port Angeles Foothiller]

34 minutes ago, Phil said:

Ozone has a distinct odor that I’ve only smelled after a barrage of close lightning strikes. Never smelled it ahead of a storm or even during most storms.

I am a medical physicist and work with linear accelerators. When we decommissioned a machine in residency we tweaked the machine (removed safety precautions) to generate electron trees. This caused the room to be filled with ozone. A very metallic odor. 

[TT-SEA]

32 minutes ago, Phil said:

In 2022 the euro seasonal projected a stout 4CH/death ridge centered over the intermountain west. Same with 2021.

I think the difference in the models this year is because 2021 and 2022 had warm off-equator SSTAs (hence more convection in subtropics) while this year has (relatively) cool off-equator NPAC SSTAs, which constrains the ITCZ meridionally. 

There was lots of chatter on here about a cold summer in 2022.   Instead it was the hottest summer ever... at least for SEA.

[TT-SEA]

Chasing a ghost at this range... but 12Z ECMWF AI run shows a very similar set up to our recent warm spell late in the run.  Centered just a little farther south.

[Port Angeles Foothiller]

1 minute ago, TT-SEA said:

Chasing a ghost at this range... but 12Z ECMWF AI run shows a very similar set up to our recent warm spell late in the run.  Centered just a little farther south.

That trough better push out by April 8th

[the_convergence_zone]

1 hour ago, Phil said:

I’d never heard that word until today. Is that what people mean when they say it “smells like rain”?

I figured that fresh, earthy scent was just water in the air. But now that I think of it, I don’t usually smell it in the winter. But it’s always present in the summer.

I think that's because the bacteria in the soil that produce the petrichor are more widespread in the summer. 

The fun part is when you can smell it before the rain actually starts, presumably because of outflow winds from the incoming rain. 

[RaleighHillsRunner]

27 minutes ago, Port Angeles Foothiller said:

I am a medical physicist and work with linear accelerators. When we decommissioned a machine in residency we tweaked the machine (removed safety precautions) to generate electron trees. This caused the room to be filled with ozone. A very metallic odor. 

This sounds dangerous and amazing all at the same time  

[Anti Marine Layer]

There's 3 Jesses. 

@Jesse

@Cascadia_Wx

@CascadiaWx

 

[Cascadia_Wx]

1 hour ago, Phil said:

I’d never heard that word until today. Is that what people mean when they say it “smells like rain”?

I figured that fresh, earthy scent was just water in the air. But now that I think of it, I don’t usually smell it in the winter. But it’s always present in the summer.

It’s a great word and a great smell. But yeah I think it tends to happen during the warm season more, when the biosphere is awake.

I always especially love the smell in the high deserts of Eastern OR when it’s mixed with a hint of sage.

[Cascadia_Wx]

1 hour ago, Phil said:

I’d never heard that word until today. Is that what people mean when they say it “smells like rain”?

I figured that fresh, earthy scent was just water in the air. But now that I think of it, I don’t usually smell it in the winter. But it’s always present in the summer.

It’s a great word and a great smell. But yeah I think it tends to happen during the warm season more, when the biosphere is awake.

I always especially love the smell in the high deserts of Eastern OR when it’s mixed with a hint of sage.