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Originally Posted by edale
Very interesting post, but I do find it a bit odd that so many people are obsessing over this 'western heat wave'. I was just in South Carolina for a week visiting family, and kept seeing posts online about how terrible the heat in the west was. I got back to LA expecting hellish conditions, and it was 85 degrees...aka normal summer weather. Nowhere near as hot as Charleston, and pretty much what you'd expect from summer here.
100+ in Portland and Seattle is definitely hotter than normal but hardly unprecedented. I feel like summer heatwaves have always happened, but now anytime there's any type of weather event people are quick to call it 'unprecedented' or use similar calamitous language. I'm not a climate change denier by any stretch, but I do think people a prone to hyperbole these days. Vegas in the summer is always hot. I don't care that it's 120 degrees there in July...it was like that when I visited 20+ years ago. It's summer in the desert...why am I getting news alerts on my phone about stuff like that?
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Point taken the duration of the recent heatwaves across the west particularly this past one have caught my eye. Eureka, Ca for example was above 105 any heatwave that pushes temps up to or above 100 along the Pacific coast is remarkable. If it the events were more isolated or in frequent they would raise my eyebrows and say wow that’s unusual. Were talking say pushing 100 or above in seattle and above 105 to pushing 110 in Portland (record a 2021 at 114) which admittedly is easier to due to its distance from the ocean but still extreme.
I know that down-sloping winds off the cascades or any mountain range can cause anomalies of localized heat due to the effects of compression warming the air. The Santa Ana winds being the most famous but anywhere near large mountains can be affected from Denver to the Pacific coast. Western Washington and Oregon are high desert and heat waves expanding to the coast are certainly not uncommon. Just the eye popping number and regularity along with the lack of AC as a universal home appliance in the Pac NW make it dangerous.
I’m just picking Portland because it’s a median point between upper Nor Cal and Seattle & Vancouver all of which have difficult times getting extreme heat or winter weather at low elevations near the coast. Not that it doesn’t happen just the more frequent and longer duration at the extreme end of the scale are notable. The stability of weather patterns in this part of the country tend to mark it out.
Not that it needs to be pointed out that we are experiencing weird weather but the disruption of the 2-4 year cycle of El Niño to La Niña plus a 2-4 year break is one of the most fundamental key stone of world wide weather forecasting and 2023-2024 broke it and that’s something that actually deserves the hype of what the fuck.
How 2023 Broke Our Climate Models with Neil deGrasse Tyson & Gavin Schmidt
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CHJKKsOHtAk
Here’s a breakdown of Portland highs for each year going back to 1875 back at the beginning to the 1920’s 100 or above was once a decade. The 70’s are the pivot it’s not noticeable unless you’re looking for it the shorter intervals of time between extremes and the higher the extremes. We’ve also seen the opposite in the winter with the polar vortex being disrupted and extreme cold filtering down from the BC Rockies to the coast brining snow and freezing rain events.
https://www.currentresults.com/Yearl...emperature.php
Each region of the country has some niche of weather that will follow this pattern and often in unexpected ways that don’t just appear as hotter than normal. Though global temperatures for the past year have hit the 1.5 to 2.7 degrees C mark above pre industrial levels for the past 12 months. That El Niño and La Niña are flipping on and off in much shorter intervals like a light switch is for me the break the glass moment. It may not last and we may return to a more normal period of climate for a while but this extreme is likely to occur again imo if it’s not completely broken already. The time between or not is the X factor that is above my pay grade.
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