Category: Weather

Scarf weather is definitely here! The high was only 44 °F/6°C today, with the winter’s first snow on the lawn this morning. Later in the day, big fluffy snowflakes sifted down, some of it sticking to the surface of the deck in my backyard.

We had windy and rainy weather today here in the Puget Sound: not too bad in the city (0.8″ rain at 10 pm), but elsewhere there were some power outages, as well as a few cancellations of ferry sailings (between Port Townsend and Coupeville).

Here’s a little collection of fall leaves, that I picked up in the street and just put in a flat bowl with water. It shows off the reds (anthocyanins) and oranges & yellows (carotenoids) in the leaves.

Man! Hurricanes, floods (and Las Vegas) have already made 2017 an annus horribilis. Even so, Sunday and Monday brought more disaster : one of the most destructive fire emergencies in California’s history.  Some 15 fast-moving wildfires have now scorched 94,000 acres (146 sq mi) and destroyed 1,500 buildings.  At least 10 people were killed, over 100 were taken to hospitals, and some 20,000 were forced to evacuate.

I am trying again to add greenery to the front of my house, and my gardener recommended astelias (‘silver shadow’).  I have to keep an eye on them and keep them watered, since the rainy season is not yet in full swing here.

It’s getting cooler here in the Pacific Northwest, and the first big weather system will move in this weekend, bringing rain to the parched forests on the Olympic Peninsula and lawns in the cities (such as mine).

Meanwhile, the very long road to recovery for the flooded and damaged parts of Texas and Florida, and the devastated islands in the Caribbean has started.

Newspaper USA Today reports that for the first time in 300 years, there is not a single person on the tiny island of Barbuda (pop. 1,800). Every last one was evacuated, after 95% of the structures there, had been destroyed by hurricane Irma.

It was a perfect day in Seattle: not too hot, not too cold, blue sunny sky.
Of course: a different story on the other side of the continent down south; a very bad weather day in Florida.  Here is a collage of a few interesting pictures of the hurricane that I ran across on-line.

The wait is almost over (for Irma’s landfall in Florida) .. the latest tracking has hurricane Irma has Key West in the cross hairs, pass on the east of Ft Myers and Naples, and then hit St Petersburg and Tampa.

Florida Governor Rick Scott urged people on the coast all day Thursday and Friday to get out, and hundreds of thousands did, but many still stayed in their homes. The big problem is the storm surge that will surely flood thousands of homes on the Keys, and those on right on the Gulf of Mexico.

Check out the Washington Post’s free updates for Hurricane Irma, here.  Late Friday night the storm system was brushing by the north of Cuba. (It devastated Barbuda, St Martin and the Turks & Caicos Islands).   It is expected to make landfall on Sunday morning in Florida (but storm conditions will start to appear on Saturday).  The latest modeling has shifted its landfall slightly to the west — but all of Florida will feel the effects of the hurricane.  

Nevermind that Donald Trump Jr. testified before a Senate committee today (about his admitted meeting with Russians in June 2016), or that President Trump made an agreement with the Democrats on Wednesday*, blindsiding the leadership of the Republican Party.  It’s all about the Category 5 monster hurricane Irma coming for Florida.   There are gas shortages and the interstate freeways are clogged, as some 500,000 residents were told to evacuate to safer areas up north.  Hotel and motel rooms as far away as Atlanta are said to be sold out. There were long lines at Miami, and other airports with people trying to get out before the airports close down on Friday.

*To raise the debt ceiling until December, and to provide $15 billion of funding for hurricane Harvey

Monday was Labor Day in the United States: the unofficial end of summer. By this time the traditional three week fellesferie (public holiday) in Norway and elsewhere in Europe, and the bouwvak (builders’ vacation) in the Netherlands, are long gone.  I see the Dutch newspaper Volkskrant notes that it was not really a pleasant ‘topsomer’ kind of a summer in Europe, with the extreme heat there.  I don’t think we can declare 2017 a great summer for North America either, with hurricane Harvey (and another one called Irma – now a Category 5! – churning towards Florida).  In California and the Pacific Northwest firefighters are still battling very large wildfires.  The smoke is blanketing the entire state, and we are looking to on-shore winds to bring some relief on Wednesday.

It’s official : Tropical Storm Harvey has broken a 1978 rainfall record with some places now measuring over 50 inches since Friday (the numbers on the left are from earlier). So that European weather model’s prediction was not out by much, after all.  It is just mind-boggling .. to think that one or two inches of rain is a ‘lot of rain’, but here we are looking a ten, twenty times that.