The Most Boring Weather Day in Seattle History? Did it Influence the Playoff?

Although there was plenty of excitement at Seattle's CenturyLink Stadium as the Seahawks triumphed over the Panthers, Seattle's weather was just the opposite: one of the most BORING weather days in memory.  And it was one of the darkest days in a long time as well.

Here is a plot of the observations on the roof of the atmospheric sciences building at the UW in north Seattle.  The time axis on the bottom is in Greenwich Mean Time (GMT or UTC), but just consider it the last three days ending 9 AM Sunday. The third panel is temperature (black line) and dew point (red line).  Thursday and Friday showed the normal increase in temperature during the day, but Saturday was amazingly boring, with practically no daily (diurnal cycle) and a very slow warming of perhaps 1.5F.    You don't see days like that very often.  It is if the sun did not exist!

Talking about the sun, the last panel shows the amount of solar radiation reaching the surface.  Nice daily variation on Thursday, somewhat less on Friday, but VERY LITTLE ON SATURDAY.  It was a very dark day, with thick, drizzly low clouds over the entire period.

Winds?   Forget it.  They GUSTED to 4 knots yesterday!

In fact, Seattle was the darkest place in western WA on Saturday as shown by the solar radiation observations (SolRad) taken by the Washington State University AgWeatherNet sites (see below).  There was nearly three to four times more solar radiation on the coast! (GRAYL).

The cause of this darkness and unchanging temperatures was persistent low clouds over the Puget Sound region (see visible image at 11 AM).  Thick, low, drizzly clouds.  And lots of fog (but without the stink!).  Thick low clouds act as a reflective blanket:  solar radiation can't get in and infrared radiation from the surface can't get out.  The result is little diurnal temperature variation.

Why no stink?  Because the passage of weak disturbance destroyed the inversion that was capping a shallow layer of cold air near the surface.  The smell lid was taken off Seattle...thank god.

Did the weather aid the Seahawks?   It couldn't hurt.  The Panthers are used to sunny, temperate Charlotte, North Carolina and the dark, dank, drizzly Seattle environment, with the real threat of exotic smells, was certainly intimidating.   Seattle's weather is the Seahawk's 13th man (or woman), particularly since most competing teams are from sunnier locations.

Stink Fog Returns and Hits New Victims

Stink fog has returned and expanded it range, driving trash-talking against Seattle, particularly by Panther's fans and Tacoma residents.   And new insights into the origin of the mysterious odors are now available.

As described in my previous blog and numerous media accounts, a noxious odor reminiscent of either a bathroom or pulp mill hit Seattle, Bainbridge Island, and parts of the Kitsap Peninsula on Wednesday morning.

The coverage of this unfortunate phenomenon has gone national including the NY Post and the Charlotte North Carolina NBC affiliate who suggested that BOTH our city and the Seahawk's game play stank.  They will regret saying that.

But this mysterious odoriferous phenomenon is back and has expanded its range.   Today, many residents of Bainbridge Island were greeted by the now familiar stench.  Biking home this evening  I was hit by it in north Seattle.  And most importantly, large number of Victoria residents were disturbed by the sulfurous smell, as did some residents of Lopez Island.

A major contributor to the regional smell problem has been very light winds and an extraordinarily strong and very low level inversion, which caps pollutants near the surface.  Here are plots of temperature with height in Seattle on Wednesday morning and this morning (Friday).  Very strong inversion and a very shallow layer of cold, polluted air near the surface.  Unusual persistence of an extraordinarily shallow air layer capped by an inversion.

There has been an animated debate of where the smell is coming from.  One idea was that the heavy rains resulted in soggy fields with decaying organic matter, leading to the smells.  But a careful examination of the location of the smell reports indicated few on the eastside (e.g,, Redmond, Duvall, etc.) where it should have been worst.  Cross that out.

Another idea was that low tide exposed smelly tide flats.  This is attractive, since many of the locations getting hit are in the vicinity of water.    However,  the tides have not been unusually low, nor has low tide extended over a particularly long period.  Perhaps a contributor, but it doesn't explain the extended length of the smell.

Another suggestion  was that we were smelling the effluent from the Tacoma or Port Townsend pulp mills.  Perhaps a contributor, but it unlikely that two point sources could have could have produced the smell over such an extended area.

Perhaps the most outrageous suggestion, made by a reporter from a Tacoma newspaper was that Big Bertha, the broken tunnel boring machine under Seattle, hit a huge pocket of decaying matter, and that the smell ascended from the chamber being drilled to replace the broken sections of Bertha.  This Tacoma reporter noted that the access hole to Bertha looks like a giant toilet (see image, it does).

My conclusion, and one supported by my friends at the Puget Sound Clean Air Agency, is that there is no one cause.  The very strong inversion, shallow cold air layer, and weak winds were ideal for maintaining pollutants near the ground.  There are many sources of bathroom and and sulfurous smells that all contribute:  gases released from drains and waste pipes, exposed tide flats, rotting garbage (and Seattle's new composting law ensures there is plenty of that), industrial waste and pulp mills, and many more.    I often get major smell from the nearby Mathews Beach sewer pump station and it spread over thousands of feet.   Reports and my experience suggests the smell is intermittent and localized, suggesting local sources.

In some ways, the low inversion was like an odor microscope, making apparent smells that normally are diffused deep in the atmosphere.

Panther fans can tease us about the smells, but tomorrow a weak front will clean the air, the inversion will lift, and Seahawks will rise ascendant.

Stink Fog Hits Seattle

The messages starting flooding in just after midnight last night.   Fog had moved into the region accompanied by pungent odors reminiscent of manure and pulp mills.

A number of local media outlets produced stories about this unfortunate fragrance, such as the Weekly and the Stranger.

Twitter was full of complaints, some perhaps not suitable for a younger audience.

The smell was not limited to Seattle but was also noted on Bainbridge Island and north/south of the city.

My curiosity aroused, I starting looking into this relatively unusual situation.

The meteorology was favorable in many ways.   With high pressure building over the region, a very strong low-level inversion (temperature warming with height) developed over Puget Sound.  Here is the plot at Seattle for a few hours last night.  There was a shallow cool layer 100-200 meters thick which contained the fog and strong warming (the inversion above)

Inversions are very stable layers that act as lids--keeps pollutants and smells concentrated at low levels.

And then there were the winds...they were very weak (as shown by this plot around Seattle around 4 AM, the circles with dots in the middle indicate calm winds).   Weak winds produce little turbulence and vertical mixing.  That helps keep smells in.

So the meteorology was favorable to keep odors near the surface, but what were their origin?  We get this kind of weather configuration all the time with no major smell issues.  What was different this time?

I checked with Seattle Public Utilities... there was no sewer outflows/spills and they said that was true for King County.   The winds were weak, so there was no reason to expect strong air flows from regional pulp mills.

But there was something different this time....we just had major flooding...not in Seattle, but in communities to our east.   Flooding followed by relatively warm temperatures.  

It seems logical.  Large areas were covered with water and during the last day the water had receded.  Some of it farm land.  Manure and some sewage got spread over it.   Might the there have been the release of SO2 (sulfur dioxide) as the moist land stewed a bit in the warm temperatures yesterday?

Smell generation area?

As a check, I looked at the air trajectories (3D air paths) in the UW high resolution model; specifically 24h trajectories ending 10 PM yesterday.  The air came from the east side!

I talked to James Rufo Hill of Seattle Public Utilities and he thought the flooded ground idea was a reasonable hypothesis.  However, such smell scenarios are bit out of my area of expertise (thank god!), so I will leave this to my readers to push this further.

And keep in mind it could have been worse.  In fact, there is a movie (The Fog) about an unusual fog in Oregon that brought not only unpleasant odors, but zombies as well.   I will be content with the smell.

A Major Advance for Numerical Weather Prediction in the U.S.

This is important.

Today, NOAA's administrator Kathryn Sullivan announced that the National Weather Service will acquire two very powerful CRAY supercomputers to support U.S. numerical weather prediction.   A machine that will FINALLY allow the U.S. to do world-class forecasting.  (The press release is here).

In a number of my previous blogs, I complained about the inferior computing resources available for numerical weather prediction in the National Weather Service (NWS).  I noted that groups such as the European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting (ECMWF) and the UKMET office have had substantially more skillful global predictions and that their superior computer resources gave them a substantial edge.  I have also described how the U.S. has lacked high-resolution forecast ensembles (where the model is run many times), which undermined the NWS ability to predict severe thunderstorms and other small-scale features.

Everything can change now, IF the National Weather Service uses these powerful new computers wisely.

So here is why you should be excited.

Numerical weather prediction is the underlying technology of weather prediction and it dependent on computer power.

More computer power allows more resolution:  the ability to simulate smaller-scale weather features (like thunderstorms or mountain precipitation)

More computer power allows better physics, which includes the description of how clouds form or the turbulent processes in the lower atmosphere (among others).

More computer power allows better data assimilation, the use of observations to create a physically consistent three-dimensional description of the atmosphere.

More computer power facilitates ensemble forecasting, in which running the model many times allows forecasting the probabilities of weather events.

The Details

Currently, the National Weather Service has two computers (one is for backup and research), each with a throughput of roughly .21 petaflops (quadrillion operations per second).   The European Center for Medium Range Weather Forecasting has two computer that run at roughly 2.5 petaflops.   In other words, they have ten times more computer power to do FAR LESS than the U.S. NWS (the European Center does not do high resolution local prediction, the NWS does).   And it shows.

This month the National Weather Service will upgrade to two machines of .75 petaflops.

The new machines announced today will be 2.5 petaflops each, roughly TEN TIMES what we have today.

A major part of the announcement is that the new computers will be provided by CRAY, the leading supercomputer maker for numerical weather prediction (they are supplying the machines to the European Center and the UKMET office, among others).   IBM, who has held the computing contract with NOAA, could not supply the machines, because they sold their server division to a Chinese firm, Lenovo.  Thus, they subcontracted the acquisition to Seattle-based CRAY.

I have learned that the new machines will be CRAY XC-40 systems.    I suspect they will each have 50,000-100,000 processors.

The Potential

Properly used, this new computer power can revolutionize and greatly improve the skill of U.S. numerical weather prediction, with huge positive impacts for the country.  Problems in U.S. numerical weather prediction have not been limited to lack of computer power and these problems need to be addressed, such as an inability to entrain the huge knowledge based in the huge U.S. academic research community or inefficiencies/duplication of effort in U.S. government research and development.  These are issues that must be taken on now.   But the excuse of lack of computer power is gone and a renaissance in U.S. NWP is possible.

Finally, it is important to acknowledge the leadership of NOAA's Kathryn Sullivan and NWS Director Louis Uccellini in making this happen.  The environment in NOAA seems to changing in a positive way and they deserve some credit for it.

Serious Rain and Profound Rain Shadowing

Updated 10 AM.   Here is the latest 24h amounts.  Amazing totals.
As much as 13 inches on the coast, with many locations getting 5-8 inches.  But less than a quarter of an inch in the rain shadow over parts of Puget Sound and NW Washington.   Big totals (4-6 inches) along the western slopes of the Cascades.   And a very high freezing level that is melting lots of the recent snow

.........
Some large rain totals so far and amazing rain shadowing.  Here are the 24h totals ending 11 PM Sunday.   Notice how the heaviest amounts are in the foothills and just upstream of the terrain, where the air is initially forced to rise.  7.65  and 6.15 inches just upstream (SW) of the Olympics.  2-4 inches along the lower western slopes of the Cascades.

But ONLY .01 inch at one location on southern Whidbey Island in the rainshadow.  Amazing

It is hardly raining in Seattle, while biblical rain is hitting the mountain slopes.  Take a look at the latest radar...the profound rain shadow over Seattle is starkly apparent.

Why is the rain shadow over Seattle and not Sequim and Port Townsend?  Because the winds are westerly, causing the shadow to rotate over the city.  But look how heavy the rain is (yellow is heavy) just to the east.

The 4 PM sounding at Quillayute (Forks) on the Washington coast shows the strong westerly winds aloft and the extremely warm, moist flow.  The freezing level is now 10,000 ft and heavy rain is falling in the mountains (the height on this plot is in terms of pressure, 700 is roughly 10,000 ft; red is temperature, blue is dew point.  Where they are on top of each other the air is saturated).

The National Weather Service has flooding warning for a number of rivers.

Heavy Rain in Our Mountains: The Revenge of Lono

During the past months, warm rain has often buffeted our mountains.  The Cascade snowpack on January 1 is about 50% of normal and skiers are unhappy, with a number of local ski areas still  closed (such as Alpental and Snoqualmie East).   National Weather Service flood advisories have become a way of life.

Most of the warm rain events are associated with what meteorologists call, atmospheric rivers, plumes of warm, moist air moving northward out of the tropics and subtropics.   Ours generally come from around Hawaii, thus their usual name, the Pineapple Express.

But WHY is this happening?   And I mean why, not how.   The answer is clear.   The Northwest has angered Lono.  And things won't get better until we satisfy him.

Who is Lono, you might ask? 

 Lono is the Hawaiian god of storms, clouds, and rain.  Hawaiians describe him as the "akua po'o huna i ke ao lewa" or the the god whose head is hidden in the clouds. As you can see from this picture, Lono has not been happy lately.   And he is angry at us.

As a scientist, I had to convince myself that Lono is behind our problems.   First, there is the obvious fact that our warmth and rain have been coming directly from his realm, something evident in the satellite and moisture images I have shown on this blog (see an example from Sept of this year below)

But Lono has made his intentions clear in other ways.   For example, he has taken our snow and moved it to the mountains of Hawaii.   Last week, last week there was a blizzard on the volcanic peaks of the Big Island and ANOTHER blizzard is expected today, with up to a foot of snow.

Multiple blizzards in Hawaii, with more snow there then in our mountains.  Folks,it doesn't get much clearer than that.

Many of the local ski areas understand Lono's power over Northwest skiing:  recently a group from Crystal Mountain sent an offering (see below and click to see video).   It was not enough, obviously.

http://vimeo.com/115012060

Last week I decided to try my hand at helping.  So I booked a flight to the Big Island.  I know I have no special powers, but I have tried to serve and be a voice for the Northwest weather deities, cousins of Lono.   Perhaps that would have some impact.   I went straight from the Kona Airport to an ancient heiau (a Hawaiian temple, see below).  I will not describe my supplications to Lono, but they were extensive and heartfelt.

A few minutes later, there was a distinct change of wind direction and the unusually large waves lessened.  I believe Lono heard.

And my contact with Lono provided some insights of why he started sending strange weather at us starting in September.  One possibility:

Lono does not like his warriors being defeated.  The next week will clearly illustrate whether Lono is satisfied.

Heavy precipitation is forecast during the next 48 hours, but the root of the moisture is NOT from Hawaii (see graphic).

Scott Sistek of KOMO TV emailed me, suggesting the future moisture pattern looks like a phoenix and HE IS RIGHT.   And guess where the annual meeting of the American Meteorological Society will be next week....PHOENIX.   Will snow in our mountains be born out of the fall ashes?   Very deep.

The forecast precipitation for the next 72h will be large (see graphic), with 5-10 inches in places.  Substantial rain shadowing over Puget Sound.

But the air will be cold enough in the beginning to bring substantial snow before precipitation turns to rain, which might be a saving grace for many ski areas.  Cold air from eastern Washington will hold for a while, and easterly flow in the passes will be helpful in keeping precipitation as snow.  But the threat of freezing rain will be real in the passes and along the eastern Cascade slopes.

So Lono may be letting off the pressure a bit.   But we need to keep him happy.  Very happy.

HAU' OLI MAKAHIKI HO

(Happy New Year)

High Pressure Means Low Sea Level

You would think you could trust sea level/tide predictions, and generally you can.  Such water level forecasts are based on the dependable impacts of the sun and moon on tides.  

But sometimes the tide tables are way off, and the last few days are a great example.  And the cause? The record breaking high sea level pressures!

Here is plot of predicted (blue) and observed (red) water levels at Seattle (Puget Sound, of course) from December 30th through New Year's Eve.  Predictions generally about a foot too high!  Enough so that folks can really notice.

Now if we plot the same water levels, starting December 10th, an interesting thing is apparent: just the opposite situation was occurring earlier in the month, particularly around Dec 10-12th.

So why the errors?   The astronomical information about the lunar and solar orbits and distances are well known.   Why the mistakes?

The answer is the anomalous sea level pressure we have experienced this month.   Higher than normal sea level pressure produces lower water levels and the opposite (lower pressures) cause sea level to rise.

The average sea level pressure in December  for Seattle Tacoma Airport is 30.15 inches of mercury or 1020.9 hPa.  Implicit in the sea level calculations done by NOAA is average pressure.  

But what happened this month?  Here is the answer at Seattle Tacoma Airport for the last 4 weeks, with the December average pressure shown by the black line.

During the past few days, particularly on Tuesday, pressure was way above normal (by roughly 20 mb or hPa), consistent with the water levels being pushed down.   But earlier in the month (before Dec 20th) , and particularly around the 10th through 12th pressures were equally below normal, resulting in higher than normal sea levels.   I talked about this effect in an earlier blog for a low-pressure period.  But this week we saw the substantial impacts of the other direction.

Finally, there is another memorable weather factoid:  December was the warmest on record at several Northwest stations.   Perhaps this is not shocking considering we had the warmest December day in Seattle history on December 10th, with many stations getting into the upper 60s!.