Global Warming: The Three Societies

Thursday, May 22, 2014
4:19 p.m.

"Cosmos" has always been a fantastic show, but it, and its host, Neil deGrasse Tyson, seem to have gained even more popularity recently. The thing I love about Mr. Tyson is that he's not only a fantastic science educator, but he's not afraid to call out those who don't believe in the scientific method. Additionally, he clearly sees how at odds science and politics are when it comes to global warming, and he's determined to bring that to the attention of the public. Science and politics aren't synonymous; you can't disprove something determined by science with massive lobbies from oil companies. Or at least that's what we would like believe. Unfortunately, it turns out you can, and much of the American public has been conned, one way or another, into believing that global warming is all but a scam put forth by Al Gore to make him rich. It is true that scientific skepticism is good, and we should inform ourselves of what is taking place in the climatological community instead of blindly believing what our news stations tell us. There is a stark difference, however, between skepticism and denial. At this point, any skepticism with regards to global warming is generally related to the magnitude of the warming due not only to the physics behind making the atmosphere more opaque to infrared radiation but also due to the effects that this warming will have on the formation on different climatic conditions around the world. For example, it is unknown whether global warming could lead to a large increase in low-level clouds off the Pacific Coast of South America, but if it does, the result could be a significant cooling for the entire planet. Not enough to equalize the increase in heat under global warming, but definitely enough to mitigate it.

With that being said, let's get down to the meat of this post. There are three main societies with respect to global warming: the alarmists, the enlightened, and the deniers. These categories should not be treated as fixed and isolated spheres but simply as positions on a sliding continuum. Anyway, let's get started with the alarmists.

The Alarmists:

The alarmists are generally well-meaning, but they are ill-informed about the nuances of climate-change. And this is not entirely their fault. Our news stations make their money off of sensationalist stories; a story saying how Hurricane Sandy was just a precursor to the increased amount and severity of storms we'd see in the future due to global warming is going to get more readers than one saying that Hurricane Sandy was likely not related to global warming and is just another strong storm to hit the East Coast like the ones countless generations before us have experienced. Hurricane Sandy was only a category 1 storm when it landed; it just happened to make a direct hit on the biggest city in the country.

I get these emails from http://www.stopglobalwarming.org/ . I tolerate them and signed up for the newsletters because I thought they had some interesting information from time-to-time, but honestly, most of the articles there are alarmist. A perfect example is one that was recently posted by Bill McKibben of Rolling Stone magazine on Wednesday, May 21. Rolling Stone already has bad enough tastes in music (they gave Toto's best album 2 out of 5 stars!!!), and it is clear from this article that although McKibben's intentions are good, he doesn't know the science behind global warming. My favorite quote from that article is that "it's very clear that the fossil-fuel industry has five times as much carbon in its reserves as it would take to break the planet." Moreover, "on current trajectories, the industry will burn it." So, essentially, "breaking the planet" looks inevitable at this point. But how the heck would you even begin to fix such a thing? If I was Earth, my strategy would be to take my silicate remains to Venus. I honestly don't know if she could do anything, but at least I'd be graced by her beauty for some psychological consolation. Maybe I could ask her out. And if I'm really lucky, I could take her back to my place in the habitable zone.

Don't you hate it when that happens?

That's another thing. The alarmists like to paint problems but not solutions. Or, if they do paint solutions, the solutions just aren't practical. I'm a very environmentally-minded guy, but I do not support Greenpeace, and the reason I do not support them is because they do not support nuclear power. We need to work on making nuclear safer, but there is no way you can power a country with solar panels. And with river flows decreasing due to lower summer snowpack, hydroelectricity is becoming harder to come by as well.

In short, the alarmists are well meaning, but they owe it to themselves to educate themselves on the science behind global warming. I actually blame most of the alarmism circulating around on the liberal media who exaggerate stories that the scientists put out so that they can make more striking headlines. It's an unethical thing to do, and it needs to be stopped. Moreover, the alarmism contributes to the denial when these false claims of doom don't come true. Thankfully, when it comes to climate change, you don't need alarmist claims to convince others that global warming is true; you just need to look at the evidence. And that's where the enlightened come in.

The Enlightened:

There are no climate Buddhas so far, so nobody is truly enlightened when it comes to climate change. For now, this is a title we can only strive for. However, many people are very knowledgeable, learned, educated, and informed. I'm proud to say that all the college professors that I know fall into this department. Don't equate educated with a degree in this sense though... it does not take a Ph.D to be a credible source of information on climate change.

The types of people who fall into this group don't fall victim to the sensationalism of news stories; rather, they spend their time researching climate via more scientific means, such as IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change) reports or reputable sources, such as Cliff Mass' blog. Cliff's blog is one of the best sources of information for explaining climate change to the general population, and I can't recommend it highly enough. Another website I highly recommend is the EPA Climate Change Science page. Those seeking the path to enlightenment know, or, in many cases, know that they don't know, not only what is happening in the atmosphere but why it is happening.

But the main thing that sets apart this group is that even though they believe in global warming, they aren't afraid to say that some climatic changes are not due to global warming. For example, while the alarmists are freaking out about how mankind's carbon emissions are solely responsible for the melting of Greenland's glaciers, some UW atmospheric scientists did a study and found that this melting is due nearly equally to anthropogenic forcing and natural variation. It is this accurate, unbiased information that will really convince the public that global warming is happening, not doomsday stories of "breaking the planet."

From the Seattle Times

It's not just climate change too. I remember when the Seattle Times did a large article about ocean acidification off of our coast and how it was destroying shellfish in our area, and, if I remember correctly, oyster larvae in particular. Carbon dioxide released into the atmosphere is also absorbed by the ocean and turns into carbonic acid when it reacts with water. The article said that this mechanism was responsible for the recent die-offs of oysters. However, Cliff Mass responded with a blog on the subject and informed me that this was actually not the case... that the sudden acidity increase was due to a period of strong upwelling off our coast bringing deep, nutrient-rich, oxygen-poor, acidic water to the surface. Professor Mass wasn't afraid to not only call out the Seattle Times on their inaccurate information; he wasn't afraid to tell the populace the truth about why the oysters died even though the information he gave could be potential fodder for any deniers of climate change or large-scale ocean acidification. We should all strive to have an enlightened, balanced view that looks at the science behind climate change without any predispositions to alarmism. I believe that's something we can do... it's just up to those who have the knowledge to educate those who don't.

One more thing... Al Gore is not an alarmist. He is an activist and educator. An Inconvenient Truth doesn't get everything right, but it gets most things right, and he presents reasonable scientific evidence with reasonable solutions.

The Deniers:

Global warming deniers are like frictionless pendulums built for exercising the conservation of momentum. If you present them with an argument for the validity of climate change, they'll shove a response right back in your face. If you only get into a small debate over global warming, their responses will be rather tame (the momentum of the pendulum will be rather small). However, if the debate starts to explode, the pendulum's momentum will approach dangerous levels where even a glancing blow could cause serious brain or bodily trauma.

The thing is, most of their responses are readily shot down. The most common one that I've heard of is that the Earth hasn't warmed in 15 years. And guess what? For the most part, they are actually right. But just because there is a small 15-year pause in warming that has been going on for the better part of a century does NOT mean that global warming does not exist. We have had pauses before; we had one mid-century between 1945 and 1980. These pauses are undoubtedly due to natural variability, and although the specific reasons behind them are unclear, we can at least hypothesize about why they may have occurred. For example, we were in the cool phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO), a sea-surface-temperature oscillation that occurs over decade-long time scales in the Pacific, beginning during the mid 40s and ending around 1980, which was the exact same period as the hiatus in warming. We were in the "warm phase" between 1980 and 2000, and since 2000 we look to have been in the cool phase again. Our data records simply aren't long enough to make any definitive conclusions, but looking at the century or so of solid, measured data that we do have, there definitely seems to be a trend. So if a global warming denier says that the climate hasn't warmed in the past 15 years, you can say that it is probably due to the PDO having entered a cooler phase at the turn of the century that has offset some of the warming due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, and add that if there were no increase in greenhouse gases, the climate would likely have cooled over the past 15 years.

Little increase in temperature from 1945-1980 and since 2000

PDO Anomalies: note how cool phases correspond with periods of no temperature increase

Whereas deniers will sometimes make true statements, many of the ill-informed ones (especially the Republican trolls who comment on KOMO news articles) say things that are patently false. They will say that there is no empirical evidence for global warming. They will say that the greenhouse effect doesn't exist. They will even say that 99% consensus is not "science," it is just a hypothetical assumption. I could go on and on with the things I've seen. If I didn't believe climate change was such a serious problem, I'd laugh, but these types of people infuriate me. Unlike the alarmists, they generally do NOT have an open mind and change their opinion when you provide them with evidence. 

In the corporate world, it's all about money and ignorance. There is actually a "scientific organization" called the Heartland Institute that is hired by certain companies to produce scientific articles attempting to disprove global warming. The panel of scientists is exclusively anti-climate-change. They recently published a report called the NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) which focuses purely on denying the existence of climate change. It stands in stark contrast from the IPCC (International Panel on Climate Change), from which it got its name. The IPCC had over 500 lead authors, all unpaid volunteers. The NIPCC had 2, and both were paid heavy sums of money. Not surprisingly, it recently flunked a credibility test.

___________________________________________________________________

One thing that the alarmists constantly say is that "we're completely screwed." Some in the educated category say this as well. However, I must stress this: WE, here in the United States, are not completely screwed. Things will be hard, yes, especially for places like New Orleans. If push comes to shove, we may even need to leave those cities. But we will be far better off than places like Bangladesh. With rising sea levels, more intense tropical cyclones, and increasing population density, certain places in the world honestly are screwed. That's why it drives me crazy when I see these deniers thinking only of themselves and not making any effort to reduce carbon emissions.  Global warming could have massive consequences for some, and even though we all emit gratuitous amounts of carbon dioxide, we have the power to reduce our emissions and owe it to the rest of the world to do so. 

~Charles

Record Heat for May Day, and a Scorcher for the Oregon Coast.

Thursday, May 1, 2014

9:45 p.m.

I've actually got some free time on my hand before I get back to doing the last 3/10ths of my linear algebra assignment. So I thought I'd post a blog, because I haven't posted for a long time. A word of advice... don't take AMATH 352 at the UW if you don't have to. Unless, of course, you like that kind of stuff. It's not required for my atmospheric science major... but I'm just taking it so that I can pick up an applied math minor to add to my oceanography and music minors. I'm taking four intense science classes this quarter and one pretty disorganized one, so I hope ya'll can empathize to at least some extent with me for my lack of posts. Actually, I have been writing posts, but I haven't been finishing them because they've been too ambitious. 

Today was hot. Record hot. With a high of 85, Sea-Tac absolutely obliterated its 1998 record of 81 degrees. And as of 10:38, it's still 71, which is 9 degrees above our average high. I wonder if the May Day protests have been keeping things from cooling down. The model chart below gives an idea of what the temperature distribution was like this afternoon when temperatures were at their peak.

Valid 05:00 pm PDT, Thu 01 May 2014 - 12hr Fcst:   http://www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/wxloop.cgi?mm5d4_ps_slp+2014050112//84/3

A couple interesting things on this map. First of all, notice how much "colder" Eastern Washington is. While we are basking in record warmth, many places east of the Cascade crest remained in the 70s. If I had to predict a reason for this, it would be that the interior summertime continental heat has not yet really built up yet, and that Western Washington benefited from the warming effects of downsloping air flowing off the Cascades while Eastern Washington did not have this effect. But again, this is all just conjecture.

The second point is actually directly related to the downslope warming on the west side of the Cascades. When air sinks, it compresses, and it warms at a rate of 9.8 degrees Celsius per kilometer. Snoqualmie Pass is approximately a kilometer above sea level, so when air flows down from there, it has the potential to warm the temperatures below by 18 degrees Fahrenheit. In practice, the temperature discrepancy is usually not this great because these parcels of air that sink tend to lose heat at a higher rate than the surrounding air since they are warmer, but the effect is still quite strong, especially when offshore flow is strong like today. That's why the foothills have the highest temperatures in the above diagram even though they are at a higher elevation than places like Seattle. The air stops sinking once it gets to the foothills, and this heat is radiated back to the atmosphere before it can reach places to the west. Seattle may have reached 85, but North Bend hit 89, and Enumclaw hit 90.

While we are on the topic of downslope flow and North Bend, let's talk about a different North Bend: North Bend, Oregon. They hit 91 degrees on Wednesday, and they are on the coast. Why? You guessed it... downslope flow off the surrounding mountains. Another fun tidbit; they were warmer than Phoenix that day! Credit to Scott Sistek of KOMO News for the interesting facts. Brookings, Oregon, which is just a bit south of North Bend, tends to experience this effect even more often, and can have freak localized warming as a result. It's not uncommon for temperatures to be in the 50s along the coast during the winter, yet 70 in the Brookings area. Check out their and North Bend's record high temperatures for the year.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brookings,_Oregon#Geography_and_climate

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Bend,_Oregon#Geography_and_climate

Here's an example of a surface observations chart I found on one of Cliff Mass' old blog posts that shows the Brookings Effect quite well. At 80 degrees, Brookings soars above the 60s and 50s on nearly every other station. By the way, Brookings reached 86 on Wednesday.

http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2013/04/the-banana-belt-of-brookings-oregon.html

Yikes... I've gotta get on my AMATH HW... it's now 11:37 p.m. Researching this stuff takes time. But it feels good to write a blog again. Hopefully I can get back into the swing of things.

Charlie

The Wettest March on Record

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 15-16^th, 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.

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

The Oso, Washington Landslide

Monday, March 24, 2014

1:54 a.m.

Retrieved from WSDOT Flickr page

Sorry about the delay in postings. End-of-quarter finals unfortunately usually take higher priority over weather posts. This isn't always the case during the end of fall quarter, as we are in the thick of the storm season and lowland snow is a very real possibility, but in the middle of March, there's usually not too much in the way of meteorological mayhem happening. Our storm season has passed, and the threat of a major lowland snow storm is long gone. I'm afraid you'll just have to wait until November.

The weather's been pretty nice since I got out of finals. But it was rainy as hell earlier in the month, as I'm sure you are all aware. November, December, and January posted a paltry 9.15 inches of rain at Sea-Tac, whereas March has put on 7.71, and we still have a week to go! We could very well pick the 1.44 inches we need to tie the sum of these three months before March is up, and if that happens, that'll have to set some sort of record. When you factor this on top of a February that was also much wetter than average, you begin to really see how delayed our rainy season has been.

All of this rain has saturated the soils, and unfortunately, this saturated soil contributed to a massive landslide on the Stillaguamish River near SR 530. Outside of the Mt. St. Helens landslide (which was not due to soil saturation), this is the largest landslide I can recall ever seeing in the state of Washington. Take a look at the photos below... the size of this thing is colossal.

Aerial photo of the Oso mudslide taken by the Washington State Patrol on 3/23/2014. Retrieved from  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_Oso_mudslide

Dave Norman, a state geologist, said that this is "one of the largest landslides he's seen." After surveying, the slide was found to be 4,400 feet wide, 1,500 feet long, and 600 feet tall, with a 30-40 feet debris field. In addition to wiping out a neighborhood of 30 homes and blocking Highway 530, the slide dammed the North Fork of the Stillaguamish River. There were serious concerns about the dam suddenly collapsing and unleashing biblical-like floods downstream, but the river eventually gradually poked through the dam without having any catastrophic collapse take place.

Take a look at the hydrograph below for the Stillaguamish River, and look how the flow increases sharply right after the slide, then decreases. I would think that this increase would be due to the material in the slide pushing a bunch of water downstream as the slide surged down the hill. Of course, once the river was dammed up, the flow decreased dramatically.

As I mentioned earlier, this dam finally gradually let some water through. The following pictures are from the Washington State Department of Transportation's Flickr page and were taken on Sunday the 23rd.

In the midst of the horror of this event, we can at least take solace in the fact that we did not have any flash flooding associated with a catastrophic dam failure, which would have certainly caused more death and destruction, especially if it had occurred at night when everybody was sleeping. 

By Monday, the dam was continuing to erode away and flows downstream were continuing to increase. The photo below is from the Associated Press (bad, I know...), but it was such a great picture that I had to show it here.

So why did this slide occur in the first place? Well, the saturated soil certainly contributed to the slide. The North Cascades have been the wettest place in the state over the last month, with some locations picking up as much as 30 inches of rain. That's pretty insane for March. But the thing is, when it comes to sheer precipitation amounts, 30 inches of rain in one month isn't all that unusual for some locales. I remember in November 2006 when Mt. Rainier National Park got 18 inches of rain in 36 hours. THAT, my friends, is extraordinary. 30 inches of rain in three weeks is wet, but not unprecedented. This hill has survived much wetter spells, so why did it decide to give during this one?

It turns out that this hill has actually had quite a history of instability. In fact, according to a recent Seattle Times article, it is known by some simply as "Slide Hill." The article mentions four major slides (1949, 1951, 1967, two slides... one in 1949, and one 1951 . The 1949 slide was 1000 feet long, 70 feet tall, and affected a 2,600-foot stretch of the Stillaguamish, and the 1951 slide formed a small dam, giving rise to creeks in the area known as "Slide Creek" and "Mud Flow Creek."

The main cause of these slides was found to NOT be soil saturation, but to be that the river is constantly eroding away at the hill. The more it erodes the hill, the less support there is at the bottom to hold the rest of the hill up, and you get a large landslide. Saturated soil no doubt speeds up the process, and it may have been the "straw that breaks the camel's back," but this slide was not due to soil saturation alone.

In 1999, the Army Corps of Engineers issued a report warning of "the potential for a large catastrophic failure" on Slide Hill. Risk mitigation efforts began, but these were delayed when a 2006 slide moved the course of the river 730 feet. During the summer of 2006, a 1,300-foot wall of boom logs and concrete was created to prevent the river from eroding, and although this was to protect fish from sediment erosion, it also acted to stabilize the hill and hopefully lower the risk of any landslides happening. Of course, it was no match for Saturday's disaster.

Here are some more pictures of the disaster from WSDOT's Flickr site.

Below is one of the most powerful and terrifying pictures of the disaster. Comparing the slide with the size of the trees really gives you an idea of its immensity.

This is one of the most powerful and terrifying pictures of the disaster. Comparing the slide with the size of the trees really gives you an idea of its immensity. 

Here, you can see how SR 530 is completely submerged under a pile of mud, and you can see a few lucky homes that just escaped the slide.

These fallen trees bear a resemblance to those that were felled due to the pyroclastic flows from the Mt. St. Helens eruption of 1980.

Finally, the picture below was not retrieved from the WSDOT, but from Twitter. I forget who specifically I got it from. It shows Oso before and after the slide, and it is a haunting photo.

There were 14 fatalities and 176 people unaccounted for last time I checked. I can only hope the latter goes down and the former doesn't go up. If you want to help, you can donate money to the Red Cross specifically for the Oso slide (they have enough food and clothes and don't need any more) by calling 1-800 RED-CROSS or visiting redcross.org. A Disaster Relief Account for the victims has been set up at Union Bank in Arlington (525 N Olympic Ave), and you can send checks addressed to the Cascade Valley Hospital Health Foundation or donate online at http://www.youcaring.com/nonprofits/cascade-valley-hospital-foundation-disaster-relief-fund/154422.

The biggest thing you can do to help right now outside of donating a million bucks is not going to the site of the slide. These people are working their tails off to find anybody who might be alive, and we don't want to interfere with them and put anything else on their plate.

Charlie

A Good Soaking

Monday, March 3, 2014
9:57 p.m.

I don't want to say winter is over. Heck, Snoqualmie pass was closed from North Bend to Ellensburg today, which I believe is a 70 mile stretch or so. Bellingham got clobbered with snow twice in the past two weeks. But, we face an unfortunate reality - it is March, and we are warming up. In fact, we are warming up fast. Highs this week are expected to be in the mid-50s down here, and there will be plenty of times in which the passes will see liquid precipitation instead of the white stuff for a change. These temperatures aren't just affiliated with warm, subtropical patterns; as the sun gets higher in the sky, surface temperatures warm up further during the day. Our December lows average around 36, and our current lows average around 38... a two-degree difference. Our highs, on the other hand, average 52 degrees for this time of year as compared to 45 for much of December... a seven-degree difference. The pool of arctic air to our north is becoming warmer and weaker, and it is getting harder and harder for us to cool down to a point where we can get sea-level snowfall. In Seattle, snowfall chances tend to drop off dramatically after mid-February.

Highs this week will be in the mid-50s, but these temperatures will not principally be because of increased solar insolation. In fact, our lows will hover around the mid-40s all week long. What we have is a fairly continuous flow of moisture flowing off the Pacific coming into our area interspersed with brief periods of sunshine. I talked about this in my previous post. But now I want to focus on two specific storms that could be quite a doozy,

The ironic part is that these cyclones are actually relatively weak. They are dissipating as they approach the coast, and as you can see below, by the time the Wednesday night storm makes landfall on the coast Thursday afternoon, the low will have degraded to 996 millibars. That is a very weak low considering how much rain is involved with this system. However, it goes to show that you don't need a deep low pressure system to get flooding rains. On the other hand, you need sharp pressure gradients to get wind associated with a windstorm, and these sharp pressure gradients are more common with deep, powerful cyclones than small, weak ones.

Valid 01:00 pm PST, Thu 06 Mar 2014 - 69hr Fcst:   www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/wxloop.cgi?mm5d3_wssfc+///3

I should mention that there is a fair amount of disagreement between the models in terms of the timing of the rainfall. The GFS model brings periods of rain in Tuesday night and Wednesday night, with the cold front sweeping through on Thursday. The EURO gives us a similar picture but also gives us some rain Tuesday morning. The NAM on the other hand is different entirely, bringing periods of rain Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning, with the cold front sweeping through Thursday afternoon. Right now, I'm sticking with a blend between the Euro and the GFS. Majority rules, right? Also, these models are generally more accurate than the NAM.

Take a look at the picture below. It shows the precipitation predicted over the past 72 hours from 4 a.m Tuesday to 4 a.m. Friday. If you look closely, you can see a region of 10-20 inches on the windward side of Mt. Rainier. That is a tremendous amount of rain. This won't be a record flooding event by any means, but any river in Western Washington could flood, with rivers off the Olympics and the Snoqualmie Basin at the highest risk. The Skokomish will flood. I would bet my life on that.

Valid 04:00 am PST, Fri 07 Mar 2014 - 84hr Fcst:   www.atmos.washington.edu/~ovens/wxloop.cgi?mm5d3_wa_pcp72+///3

We'll need to keep an eye out for landslides. The National Weather Service actually issued a Special Weather Statement highlighting this risk. We've had quite a bit of rain recently, and this additional heavy rain on saturated soil. I remember when there was a massive landslide near our house not too long ago. It seems unlikely that an entire hill would give way, but it does happen. If you live on a hill or steep bluff, take note of this. The landslide risk will diminish Thursday onward as the rainfall lightens up.

Stay dry! Or at least make a decent attempt. :)

Charlie