Here is the daily rundown of weather for November, 2008.  The average high temperature of 55.10 degrees makes it the 8th warmest November on record at Portland Int'l Airport. Read more »

Add it to the list of things to be thankful for this season -- Dr. Dale and his wonderful time lapses!

He's on a new server now, and that's allowing him to capture more and more of these windows into the weather world. And your positive comments sure help!

This week, he had his camera rolling on six full days since last Friday. Enjoy!

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WASHINGTON (AP) -- It's not just families that are getting together this Thanksgiving week. The three brightest objects in the night sky - Venus, Jupiter and a crescent moon - will crowd around each other for an unusual group shot.

Starting Thanksgiving evening, Jupiter and Venus will begin moving closer so that by Sunday and Monday, they will appear 2 degrees apart, which is about a finger width held out at arm's length, said Alan MacRobert, senior editor at Sky and Telescope magazine. Then on Monday night, they will be joined by a crescent moon right next to them, he said.

Look in the southwestern sky around twilight - no telescope or binoculars needed. The show will even be visible in cities if it's a clear night. Read more »

WASHINGTON (AP) - The 2008 Atlantic hurricane season, which ends Sunday, seemed to strike the United States and Cuba as if on redial, setting at least five weather records for persistence and repeatedly striking the same areas.

"It was pretty relentless in a large number of big strikes," said Georgia Tech atmospheric sciences professor Judith Curry. "We just didn't have the huge monster where a lot of people lost their lives, but we had a lot of damage, a lot of damage."

Data on death and damage are still being calculated, but the insurance industry recorded at least $10.6 billion in losses this hurricane season. That includes $8.1 billion in insured damage from Hurricane Ike, which ranked as the seventh most expensive catastrophe in the United States history, according to Mike Barry of the Insurance Information Institute in New York. Read more »

OK, so not exactly a weather topic today, but the weather is boring, so in perusing some of my past e-mails for inspiration, I found a discussion I had with a former Alaska Airlines pilot in talking about airport elevations.  But I also learned some neato stuff about how aviation works in general.

You might have seen big numbers painted on the end of runways, or heard the lingo.  PDX's main runways are 10L, and 10R, and then there's 28L and 28R.

Wait a minute, 4 runway names? But there's only two main runways there? Read more »

Far and away, *the* most popular e-mail we get into the weather bin is some variance on: "Do you think we'll get any big snows this winter?"

Long range forecasting is an inexact science. At best, we can usually just give odds on whether it'll end up being warmer or colder, or wetter or drier than normal.  But even then, it's marginal (like, "a 55% chance of a warmer than normal year") and most of the time, the long range predictions bust, such as the really wet spring this year, or the mega rains of the 2006/7 winter.

But there's always speculation, and while that mutual fund saying of "past performance is no guarantee of future results" rings generally true for climate forecasting, it's sure fun to ponder, "what if?" Read more »

In what is fast becoming a Friday tradition in this space, we've got another several days worth of time lapses today from Dr. Dale Ireland over in Silverdale -- this time I even gave them the correct date stamp! (Don't ask…)

Some of these I'd watch a few times -- take one pass just staring at the clouds, another just watching the mountains, and a third time watching the water to note the wind patterns and marine traffic. (At least one of these has another Bangor sub going out for training.)  Read more »

OK, a bit of a Seattle-area theme today as it was an event up there that prompted today's blog entry, but the same physics works down here.

I had a viewer who lives in Bothell, just north of Seattle, write in that he could hear the fog horns from the Edmonds ferry on Sunday, and wondered how it was possible, what with the ferry roughly 11 miles away.

Turns out, Sunday was a great day, atmospherically speaking, to listen in on distant events.
There were two factors in play -- one, a fog layer hugging the Puget Sound shoreline, and second, a temperature inversion over the area. Read more »

Patricia Gordon captured this photo at sunset near Tulalip, Washington on Nov. 15th. But note the vertical stripe of light near the horizon?

That's called a "sun pillar," and it's caused by ice crystals in clouds positioned in just the right way that it reflects the sun light in this column-like fashion. Read more »

The Northern Lights are a rare treat around Portland. But what about auroras on Saturn?

Scientists used to think, "no way," but the Cassini space probe just proved otherwise.

The photo above is from the Cassini probe. Here's the description from NASA:

"Energetic particles, crashing into the upper atmosphere cause the aurora, shown in blue, to glow brightly at 4 microns (six times the wavelength visible to the human eye). The image shows both a bright ring, as seen from Earth, as well as an example of bright auroral emission within the polar cap that had been undetected until the advent of Cassini. This aurora, which defies past predictions of what was expected, has been observed to grow even brighter than is shown here."

You can read more at nasa.gov

As for around here, the sun is in its minimum activity phase of its usual 11 year cycle of activity. It takes a really strong solar flare to see the Northern Lights this far south, so prospects of a light show here in Portland anytime soon are pretty slim.

But how about some stuff we do get to see around here on a frequent basis: Time lapses!

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It's not quite the discovery of "E.T." but astronomers say they have the first actual photos of planets that exist outside of our solar system. Strangely enough, those planets have probably seen more of our own sun than we have lately.

Here is the full article from Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer: Read more »

Here are some gorgeous time lapses, courtesy of Silverdale's Dr. Dale Ireland, to get you through the weekend:

November 4:

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It sounds like a great drink to sip on a Hawaiian beach, but instead, it's the nickname for a fairly common winter pattern that typically brings us our heaviest rains of the year.

It's caused when the jet stream -- which acts like a steering force in controlling where weather goes -- dips down into the tropics of the Pacific Ocean, and then carries a large batch of tropical moisture northeast into the Pacific Northwest. Read more »

I was so hopeful on my drive in this morning. I had heard the uncanny statistic where the Washington Redskins were nearly  perfect in predicting the outcome of the presidential election.

I think it goes that if the Redskins win their last home game before the election, the party in charge keeps the White House. If they lose, it means the other party wins. They had been a perfect 17 for 17 in this prediction until the election in 2004 went against the grain.

But I figured maybe there was some correlation between rain on an election day in Portland and how the White House goes and I'd have the best blog entry ever. Read more »

October ended up cooler but drier than usual -- in fact, the month was highlighted by two decent dry streaks of weather, including three of the month's four weekends!  Here are the official stats: Read more »

We spend a lot of time dealing with the weather right above our heads. But there's a great site out there that helps deal with the 'weather' at much higher altitudes. Read more »

The weather pattern across the globe is fairly exaggerated right now, and that typically means quite the extremes of weather happen.

We have two very strong ridges of high pressure -- one centered over the heart of Wyoming and another out in the north central Atlantic Ocean. But in between those ridges, you can get some real cold snaps.

That's because the ridge will drive air way up to the north into the arctic regions, then drive it south on the backside of the ridge.  To wit: Some very cold air was being pushed down from northern Manitoba and into the northeast and mid-Atlantic states, bringing their first snow of the season. As much as 12-14" fell in some spots, and there were nearly 100,000 people without power across the northeast.

Snow even fell in Ashville, North Carolina.

Here's a snapshot of the current set up over the United States. Blue is cold, red is warm (No, bleary-eyed political news junkies, that's not an electoral map -- although cool down the west coast a bit and...)

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Fog is a way of life around here. Portland averages 33 days a year with dense fog -- meaning the visibility dropped to 1/4 mile or less at some point of the day.  And October is the foggiest month, averaging 7.2 days of dense fog per month.

But what causes fog? And why is fall our foggy season? Let's dive in: Read more »

It's not something I can quantify with statistics, but is it me, or has this October been one of the best, if not *the* best ever for fall foliage?

As to what makes the autumn leaves, I'm no botanist, but quick research on the Internet shows that leaves on deciduous trees get their summertime green color from chlorophyll, which is the substance that the leaves use to turn sunlight into energy.  

When the days get shorter and the nights get colder, the leaves die off, and the green chlorophyll goes away, leaving the reds, yellows and oranges in the base color of the leaves to come through.

Around here, our pretty leaves season seems to always be cut short because we usually have a few windstorms roll through that blow away most of the leaves, and the cloudy skies keep overnight temperatures up.

But this October has been perfect conditions.  The past few weeks have seen many clear and cold nights to kill off the chlorophyll. And aside from the first few days of the month when it was fairly windy, we've hardly had any wind to blow the leaves off the trees. Read more »

Who'd have thought some long ago dead plants in the arctic circle might contribute to climate change? Or that your new flat-screen TV could mean a hotter summer some day? Check out this article from AP writer SETH BORENSTEIN

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Dr. Dale Ireland has outdone himself now. Our resident weather watcher with the great web camera in Silverdale had his camera rolling on Monday when we had a cold front pass through in the morning, followed by a period of unstable air, a brilliant rainbow, and even the passing of a Convergence zone. Read more »

Several cities around the Puget Sound area reported hail today as some cold, unstable air moved in behind a cold front.

Here is some video of the hail in Bonney Lake, Wash., captured by YouNews contributor tomski: Read more »

We hear it all the time when someone comes into our weather office: "So, where's the dartboard?"

It's actually hidden in our coat closet, but more times than not the games of cricket are just for fun and we base our forecasts off computer model projections.

But computers are never wrong, right? So how do forecasts still go awry?

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