Saturday, December 21, 2019

The Weather in Seattle

Being the petty person that I am, I enjoy looking at the weather in Seattle in the winter.  This time, I'm extending them some sympathy for how terrible it is.  This article is from KOMO.  The atmospheric river of water referred to is what we used to call a Pineapple Express.  It's like being drenched with a fire hose originating in Hawaii.

SEATTLE -- December 20 is already among the longest nights of the year but did it feel like the sun forgot to get up today? Amid a torrential, record-breaking, hours-long rainfall that saw Seattle get over 3 inches of rain in 18 hours, now word comes it was among the darkest days on record as well.
Sunlight measuring equipment at the University of Washington's Atmospheric Sciences Building only registered 0.37 million Joules of sun energy Friday -- the lowest amount recorded since those measurements have been kept at UW over the past 20 years, according to professor Cliff Mass.
The previous record was 0.39 mJ measured on Dec. 14, 2006, says UW research meteorologist Mark Albright. If that day sounds familiar, it was the day of the infamous Hanukkah Eve wind storm.
But today you had the perfect ingredients for a record breaker: A date on the calendar just about on the Winter Solstice when the sun is at its lowest point in the sky and shortest duration above the horizon, combined with a nearly historic atmospheric river event keeping thick cloud cover over the region all day long.

7 comments:

  1. Ugh! I won't complain about our "Norte" (cold front) that blew through on Tues. night/Wed. morning then. We also had 3" of rain (but in only a few hours, so lots of flooding) and high wind that blew for about 18 hours. But two days later the sun came out, so I will take it over Seattle any day.

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  2. ha! 3" in 18 hours. I sneer at their 3" in 18 hours. that's just normal rainfall around here. my brother lives up there, not Seattle though he used to live in the vicinity but now they live just across the river from Portland. I could never live there...not enough sun.

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  3. I'm curious about the fellow who drove his truck downstairs.

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  4. being the petty person I am, I love to watch the Rochester winter weather feeds as I sit, smugly, in beautiful sunny weather. That's really not such a bad thing, is it?

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  5. Well, while I'm sympathetic to a point, - 3 inches in 18 hours? We get 3 inches in 30 minutes on a regular basis!

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  6. I think the larger point is that it rained off and on for 48 hours, and that there was zero sun visible during that period. It's a fairly gruesome climate when it gets like that. It wouldn't be so bad if it would just rain and get it over with, but noooo it has to be grey and cloudy all winter.

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