I don’t comment much about weather, but the subject came up in an iChat with a friend on the east coast.
Here in the Pacific Northwest we really only have two seasons, “wet” and “dry”. “Wet” lasts from sometime in September or October, until early July. Dry lasts from early July (usually the 5th or 6th!) until sometime in September or October.
In the 1980s “drought” years “dry” would sometimes last until November. I remember climbing “Outer Space” on the Snow Creek Wall over a weekend in early November around 1987 or so. It was cold at night but very warm… “hot” even during the day. Recently our weather has been unsettled, with either VERY wet years (in 1999 we didn’t really have a “Dry” season… until September. Last winter was the as dry as “wet” can be, with hardly any snow in the mountains and very little rain down here. Oddly enough the past few year’s “wet” started big, with some big October storms … these pictures were taken two years ago today. But then settled into a “very sparsely moist” rather than our usual full-on “wet”.
Well, the “wet” has returned to the Pacific Northwest. October has been more rainy than clear, and quite chilly as well. We had a brief little “Indian Summer” the past two days, mostly sunny temps in the high-60s F. Friday I drove the Jag down to the body shop for the bonnet ding to get repaired, and yesterday was spent hacking back the grass since the sun was out (making hay while the sun shines as it were.) Today however reinforces how brief that nice respite was. Rain, mist, fog, temps in the 40s & 50s F.
It will be this way, relentlessly wet, with only high winds and storms to break the monotony from now until January when the “storm season” ends, and then it will just be plain old rain. You can basically say “Rain, mixed with showers, with a rare sun-break, lows in the mid-30’s, high’s in the mid-50’s” if you were a weatherman from now until March. Sure, we’ll have a few snows sprinkled in there, and of course that one week in January or so when the sun comes out… just to keep us from killing each other. Sometime in April we’ll start to see more sun, and warmer temps, and the Jag will come back out of the barn now and then. Until then, you won’t hear me talk about it other than winter-time projects. (Like my plan to perhaps do something about the radio console once and for all.)
When the “Dry” season returns, I’ll comment about our reward for the crappy weather we put up with around here, until then, I’ll try not to say much about weather.