The media loves to highlight extreme and exciting weather, but they have missed a critical opportunity: to describe perhaps the most important extreme of all-- extremely boring weather.Where in the U.S. are folks experiencing the same, dull weather, day after day? How dull can it get?You won't find coverage of this topic on CNN or your...
Climate Extremists
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On March 11, 2011 a wall of water, reaching 130 ft high in places, struck the Japanese coast causing extraordinary devastation, including nd extensive damage to the Fukashima nuclear power plant.Should we blame this disaster on global warming? Certainly, the warming of the earth, caused by both natural and greenhouse gas forcing, has caused sea...
Summer SuperFog
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Coal Train Update Last night (Thursday) Professor Dan Jaffe, myself, and some students took observations of particle levels at Richmond Beach Park in Shoreline on the bridge over the track. The goal was to determine what was coming off the coal trains. We sampled several freight trains and one coal trains. ...
Asian Haze is Back
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Looking towards the Cascades this morning, much of the detail is obscured and Mt. Rainier is barely visible from Seattle (see image).And viewing the number of particles in the air from the local air quality network shows an increase in obscuration (this data is from a device called a nephelometer and show the number of small particles). ...
Answering the Complaints
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There has been a lot of griping about the weather this summer, with a number of you asking whether lousy summers are the new normal.Well, let me try to convince you that this summer is really better than last summer....Let's begin with comparing the temperatures at Sea-Tac for the past four weeks with those of last summer. The first image is...
The Tropical Connection
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Thursday and Friday brought extraordinary thunderstorm activity to the Northwest, with torrential rain hitting both sides of the Cascades. I can not remember such a period of such sustained summer convective activity in our area.It turns out that there is a tropical connection to this outbreak, a fact noted to me by Dr. Jim Steenburgh, an ex-Husky...
Flash Floods Hit the Northwest
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7 AM Friday Update: Forced by an upper level trough, heavy convective showers are now moving through western WA (see radar). Should continue through the morning and will dry out by mid-afternoon. Saturday relatively dry with morning low clouds. More on KPLU at 9 AM and then online at www.kplu.org. East of the Cascade...
