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| A lion in West Midlands Safari Park: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Just_one_lion.jpg |
They say March roars in like a lion. Well, March didn't just have
a singular lion, or even an open salvo of them. It had a continuous stampede
of them. They say these beasts are endangered, but after this month, I'm not so
sure. There seem to be plenty to go around.
March picked up 9.44 inches of rain this
month, crushing the previous record of 8.40 set back in 1950. But what I think is far more
amazing is that November,
December, and January summed up only 9.16 inches of rain. That's right folks;
with March bringing in 9.44 inches, March got .28 inches more of rain than the
stormiest three months of the year COMBINED. I cannot stress how
unfathomably ridiculous this is. In my mind, this is far more incredible than
breaking the record for most March rainfall. When you combine this with a wet
February, it goes to show that our storm season really got started late around
here.
My official winter weather outlook
(exclusively on WeatherOn.net) mentioned that this winter would be hard to
predict, and I'm glad I mentioned that, because I certainly couldn't have
imagined this ever happening, and I doubt even the most seasoned of
meteorologists could have either. When we don't know what to go with as
meteorologists, we usually stick with climatological norms, as they tend to be
the median values for what we could expect during a winter. The situation,
however, is different when you take into account the fact that this past winter
was a neutral one, and neutral winters are renowned for their inconsistency. In
that winter forecast, I mentioned that the upper plains and Midwest would be
cold (boy was I right about that one), the south would be warm and dry (didn't
really pay attention), and the northeast had an increased probability of storms
(they had a few, but I haven't done enough climatological surveys to determine
whether this year was abnormal).
Meanwhile, for the Pacific Northwest, I
predicted an inconsistent winter.
This is something
we can be relatively sure of. I’m not talking about day-to-day, or even
week-to-week. What I’m talking about is that our winter will likely not be
dominated by one pattern. Neutral winters rarely are. Instead, they are
dominated by a multitude of patterns.
Please, please,
hold your applause. There's a significant amount of luck that comes with
forecasting. After all, being at the top demands humility.
But let’s take a look at the entire loop for the month. Our
biggest systems came in on March 5th and March 15-16th, and the
former dropped 1.84 inches of rain in 24 hours, our highest 24-hour total for
the month. One thing that was interesting about these two storms is that
whereas the mid-march storm had heavy rain and remained over our area for an
entire day, the early one had extremely heavy rain while dropping the majority
of rainfall over us in just a couple hours.
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| 05:29 am PST, Wed 05 Mar 2014 |
It's not often that you see a big band of yellows over our area. And remember, this is a logarithmic scale, meaning that a small increase in dBZ on the left corresponds to an exponentially larger increase in precipitation rates. Those yellows represent rain falling at the rate of greater than a half-inch an hour. It doesn't take too much time to rack up 1.84 inches at that rate. We had around two to three hours of this heavy stuff, giving us over an inch, and heavy showers later in the day picked up the rest.
For April, things don't look quite as wet. The weather has been quite "seasonable" so far, and this weekend may turn out to be quite nice. I'll keep you posted.
My next post will be about our impending El Nino. It could be a Biggie.
Charlie
