Category: Weather

We have had about 1 in. of rain here in the city, and there will likely be more by the way of showers tomorrow.
The snowcap on Mount Rainier’s peak is back, after most of it had melted away in the heat of the summer.

On August 22, Tropical Depression Henri dumped 1.94 inches on Central Park between 10 p.m. and 11 p.m., breaking the record for the most rain in an hour in New York City.
Ida bested that record just 11 days later, dropping three inches of rain between 8:51 and 9:51 p.m. on Wednesday night. The intense downpour caused flooding throughout the city, as well as the first flash-flood emergency* ever to be issued in New York City.
– Matt Stieb writing in Intelligencer

*Emergency means the flooding poses an imminent, ongoing severe threat to life, and catastrophic damage.

The gauge at Seattle-Tacoma airport recorded only 0.11 inches of precipitation for the month of August, far below the mean of 0.92 in.
The East Coast of America is getting soaked, and the West is dry as a bone.

Hurricane Ida is the ninth named storm of the 2021 Atlantic hurricane season, and formed on Thursday in the Caribbean Sea.

A levee failed near Highway 23, resulting in flash flooding. I hope Monday will bring news that the infrastructure that had been added after hurricane Katrina, to mitigate the storm surge threat from the ocean and the bodies of water in the area, had done exactly that.

Mon 8/30 update: Reported by Reuters: A $14.5 billion system of levees, flood gates and pumps has largely worked as designed during Hurricane Ida, sparing New Orleans from the catastrophic flooding that devastated the area 16 years ago in the wake of Katrina, officials said.

Ida made landfall as a Category 4 hurricane near Port Fourchon, Louisiana. The entire city of New Orleans was without power on Sunday night.

I watched a little bit of storm-chasing on YouTube and Facebook Live today.
Below are stills from the Facebook Live feed from Reed Timmer ‘Extreme Meteorologist’.

With Hurricane Ida projected to slam Louisiana on anniversary of Katrina, anxiety grips the region

People across Louisiana were deciding Saturday whether to leave or ride out what officials were calling a potentially “life-altering” storm as Hurricane Ida rapidly gained strength in the warm waters of the Gulf of Mexico — threatening to become one of the strongest storms to make landfall in the state since 2005, when Hurricanes Katrina and Rita devastated the region.

The National Hurricane Center was predicting that Ida would strengthen to a Category 4 hurricane with 140 mph sustained winds before making landfall in rural Terrebonne Parish, southwest of New Orleans, on Sunday afternoon. The storm was projected to bring an “extremely life-threatening” storm surge, “potentially catastrophic wind damage,” and widespread flooding, and with Ida projected to come ashore on the 16th anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, anxiety gripped the region.

– Emmanuel Felton, Tim Craig, Carmen K. Sisson, April Capochino Myers, Leslie Fain & Ashley Cusick writing for the Washington Post

Batten down the hatches, close the gates

Today, a decade* after Katrina left 80 percent of New Orleans underwater and killed more than 1,600 people, the Big Easy has been reconstructed as a walled city. The Lake Borgne Surge Barrier is just one of a series of gargantuan structures and reinforced levees and floodwalls designed to defend the city against a 100-year storm—a Katrina-like catastrophe that has a 1 percent chance of occurring in any given year. This feat of engineering, prosaically called the Hurricane and Storm Damage Risk Reduction System, forms a 133-mile enclosure around New Orleans and the 350 miles of canals that traverse the city—the canals the Corps had relied on to contain floods and that failed so disastrously in 2005. “We’re taking the fight to the storm instead of letting it come to us,” says Boyett.
-*From a 2015 article asking ‘Will the ‘Great Wall’ of New Orleans Save It From the Next Killer Hurricane?’ by Todd Woody

The high was 94°F (34°C) here in the city today, and the air quality was not the best (wildfire smoke from Canada and eastern Washington). Bellingham to the north of Seattle recorded 100°F (38°C), a new record for any month.   

Even so, early evening found me on the Lower Woodland Park tennis courts for the regular Thursday night social tennis. I made sure I had extra water and a banana to keep me going.

Update Fri 8/13: Friday’s highs here in Seattle reached 96°F (35.5°C). It is going cool down on Saturday and Sunday, thankfully.

A little rain fell into the gauge at Seattle-Tacoma airport yesterday, ending the 51-day dry streak there.
There were pleasant, cool temperatures around the city today (69 °F/ 21 °C). A little bit of rain may fall later tonight and in the morning.

Summer is definitely not over, though: we are going to get into the mid-90s by Thursday, and even have to deal with wildfire smoke.

It’s official: the rainfall for July was a T (for trace), as measured at Seattle-Tacoma airport. The weather people are promising us that it will rain on Friday, though.

As the dry days of July come to an end, we are having warmer weather through Saturday.
The highs are around 89 °F (32 °C).

It has been 22 days since we had any rain, and there is none really, in the forecast for the next 7 days (‘chance of drizzle’ for tomorrow morning).
July is the driest month on the Seattle weather calendar, but even so, its average is about 1 in. of rain.

The brutal heat of Monday had given way to cooler weather on Tuesday & Wednesday.
Here in the city we had 73 °F (23 °C) for a high today— perfect for going out and playing a little tennis.