July 12, 2023
A Warm-Dry Summer without Drama
The tenor of the 2023 Northwest summer is now clear: modestly warmer and drier than normal but without "excitement".
By excitement, I mean record-breaking heatwaves or heat/wind combinations that might produce major wildfire events.
The atmosphere can get "stuck" into certain configurations due to persistent areas of sea surface temperatures and thunderstorm patterns in the tropics, among other reasons.
This year the atmosphere has been "stuck" in a situation that has brought excessive precipitation and cooler weather to California and warmer/drier weather to the Northwest.
A measure of the "stickiness" of the atmospheric flow can be seen in the sea surface temperatures along the West Coast, which has a lot of memory. As shown below, the waters off Californian and Oregon are substantially cooler than normal (the figure shows the difference from normal in degrees C, roughly double for F). Swimming on the Oregon coast will not be pleasant.
https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2023/07/a-warm-dry-summer-without-drama.html
