You can't draw a breath without hearing about how humans are overheating the planet, and "weird" weather is held up as proof.
Skeptics point to number-fudging by everyone from NOAA to the U. N., and today this piece appeared in a small-town WA newspaper:
...showing that rainfall amounts are chronically being under-reported in the Pacific Northwest.
No wonder major storms are "unprecedented".
Mark L. Fergerson
The report wasn't very specific about where the rainfall gauges were located.
The Pacific Northwest does include a lot of coastal area, and you do get a lot more rain close to the coast. In Tasmania the west coast gets 140" of rain a year, and the northwest coast, where I grew up, gets 40".
A reporter who wasn't well-informed about that kind of variation could have got the wrong idea. Seattle is famously damp.
-- Bill Sloman, Sydney
Try reading the article again, this time without the alarmist headline. What the article says was that the paper reported an incorrect cumulative rainfall number for October. It then went on to provide numbers from other sources that readers could use to correct their statistics. No conspiracy required or involved.
When I was baby sitting several mountain top weather stations, getting accurate rainfall numbers was painful. One local mountain top had 3 professional quality weather stations within maybe 300 ft of each other. Cumulative rainfall varied about +/15%.
There's a long list of reasons why this was happening, none of which were easy to fix. For example, when the wind was really blowing hard, the rainfall would be turbulent and rainfall almost horizontal causing some of the rain to miss the collection bucket. Of course, there were the usual bugs and critters that like to live inside the collector. During winter, the bucket might be frozen. Power failures sometimes caused gaps in the collection record.
My fix was to edit the collected data, make whatever corrections were needed, and do my best to keep the numbers sane. I had a Perl script that looked at the collected data, and checked for missing data and insane numbers. When I finally stopped doing this, the station engineer thought that their weather stations was broken because it suddenly started producing strange numbers and had holes in the data. Nope, that was normal. What was missing was all my hand corrections.
Anyway, I would give the Greater Lewis County Chronicle some credit for publicly admitting that there was a problem and offering some help to those that rely on the data. Nobody is lying and the sky is not falling.
Accuracy of rain gauge measurements
Back 20+ years ago, Seattle was trying to woo companies to the area with ads touting the relatively reasonable rainfall they get in inches per year.
Of course it tends to *drizzle* almost continuously, as opposed to, say Florida where you get a brief downpour and then sunshine.
Seattle: 38"/year Sunny days per year: 152
Boca Raton: 58"/year Sunny days per year: 231
--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8
the planet, and "weird" weather is held up as proof.
d today this piece appeared in a small-town WA newspaper:
n the Pacific Northwest.
You're misreading the article, it's about deadbeats failing to take daily r eadings, but, since you know next to nothing about it, it all went over you r head. CoCoRaHS is all volunteers at the local level, the brain deads were not taking their daily readings, the Western Regional Climate Center is an other joke operation apparently.
"Sunny days" = "days with some sun". An additional bit of bait-n-switch there. ;)
Cheers
Phil "Vancouver is a good place to be from" Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
Looks like you could also use some remedial cryptic newspaper article decoding practice. The article mentions CoCoRaHS as an alternative source of replacement data to fill in the blanks from WRCC (Western Regional Climate Center), which had 20 out 31 days with no data. "A third resource, the Community Collaborative Rain, Hail & Snow Network, known as CoCoRaHS, reported that Centralia got 11.76 inches of rain in October. The CoCoRaHS network missed five days in October, according to their data." Although it managed to lose 5 days worth of data, the newspaper considers that an improvement over the WRCC:
The WRCC anomaly data for the past 6 months for Washington state show quite a bit of missing data: The 451276 CENTRALIA row, in the Np (number of days with missing precipitation), shows 11 days of missing data in the last 6 months. That kinda makes me wonder why the author of the newspaper article claimed 20 missing days in 6 months. Anyway, if you look at the Np column, you'll see that missing data is regular event with WRCC as it is with many such weather data collection systems.
My guess(tm) is what happened is a repetition of a common problem that occurs every October 1. That's the beginning of the "water year", where weather monitors are suppose to reset their accumulated rain and stream totals to zero. Most, get it right, but there are always those that manage to screw things up and just continue accumulating data from the previous water year.
CoCoRaHS is one of several "crowd source" weather data collection networks base on manual data supplied by observers. Everything is done much like in the stone age of weather reporting, using manual observations. For rain, they require a 4" or larger high capacity rain gauge. Notice the lack of automated weather recording equipment. However, it's not a joke run by deadbeats as you claim. Much useful information can be obtained from observers, even though they do tend to take vacations, become ill, or are distracted. Most commonly, the observer data is used as a sanity check to detect failed or failing automated monitoring equipment.
For a volunteer system that works, see CWOP and MESONET:
-- Jeff Liebermann jeffl@cruzio.com 150 Felker St #D http://www.LearnByDestroying.com Santa Cruz CA 95060 http://802.11junk.com Skype: JeffLiebermann AE6KS 831-336-2558
I had a couple of college friends that were from Seattle. They described it as " dry rain ". That translates roughly to you can ignore the rain and you will not get wet. Not enough rain to bother with a rain coat of umbrella
Dan.
I've been to Seattle perhaps a half-dozen times. Nothing but very clear skies, bright sun, green, super attractive. Everybody said it had just been raining, but it looked pretty good to me!
--
Thanks,
- Win
Summer here is gorgeous. People visit here and think that we've been engaging in some massive disinformation campaign to discourage even more in-migration.
Then November comes (this year it came in October). Sorry, those 152 days of sun are gone, time for the other 213...
-F
...oh yes, young people here seem impervious to rain and cold. I suspect that most of you would not be.
By contrast, we claim 360 days of sunshine and just 11" of annual rainfall.
However, unlike *hiding* from it, most folks drop whatever they're doing to watch it rain. And, I can't recall ever seeing anyone "running" through the rain in attempt NOT to get wet!
[Of course, it is usually warm when it rains so it's not that numb-you-to-the-bone sort of rain you get other places in late fall or early spring]
I would, the less people the better.
Eventually you'll get soaked to the skin, even though it doesn't seem worth the bother for a short time.
--sp
-- Best regards, Spehro Pefhany Amazon link for AoE 3rd Edition: http://tinyurl.com/ntrpwu8
I think your explanation makes it even worse! If "sunny days" are days with "some sun", that means the remaining days are days with NO sun.
Seattle: 38"/year Non-Sunny days per year: 365-152=213
Boca Raton: 58"/year Non-Sunny days per year: 365-231=134
Over half the days in the year Seattle gets no sun all day long??? That's horrible!!!
-- Rick C
I'm in CoCoRaHS and their manual rain gauge is an order of magnitude more a ccurate than anything electronic or "automatic"- You seem oblivious to the fact that regional rainfall is anything BUT uniform density. At the risk of stating the obvious to most people, rain falls from clouds, clouds are dis crete masses and physically small on the scale of the regional area- this m eans a single data collection point almost never gives an accurate reading for the region, the discrepancy could be huge- that's why a large CoCoRaHS presence is good for NWS. Personally not concerned with NWS, only concerned with my immediate area and its precipitation statistics for purposes of su pplemental landscape watering.
That's why I moved to Arizona straight from graduating MIT 54 years ago ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
I was giving a seminar at DEC, Colorado Springs (MANY years ago). One of the attendees was from Portland, OR. He opined that what I might observe of him as tanning was actually rust ;-) ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
I wouldn't call that rain last week "warm"... fortunately I always have an umbrella in the car. ...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson | mens |
| Analog Innovations | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| STV, Queen Creek, AZ 85142 Skype: skypeanalog | |
| Voice:(480)460-2350 Fax: Available upon request | Brass Rat |
| E-mail Icon at http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |
I'm looking for work... see my website.
Sissy! ;-) I was engaged in one of my daily "constitutionals" when the rain started. So, it was 30 minutes of WALKING in the shower instead of STANDING in the shower...
I think you've forgotten what "cold" is like! I'm amused when I see people wearing sweaters on warm summer evenings or, walking the neighborhood wearing *gloves*!
Of course, I can readily recall what -26F felt like or wind-chill factors of -80F... when you stop feeling "cold" and, instead, feel *pain*! :<
I don't own one. And, during Monsoon, can't see how they can really be effective; horizontal rain, high wind gusts, etc. And, they do nothing for the inch+ deep puddles and streams that materialize instantly: "Plan on getting your feet wet!"
Yup. That's the point I was making--Seattle and Vancouver have horrible weather. Not as bad as Toronto or Halifax or St. John's, but bad.
Cheers
Phil Hobbs
-- Dr Philip C D Hobbs Principal Consultant ElectroOptical Innovations LLC Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 160 North State Road #203 Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 hobbs at electrooptical dot net http://electrooptical.net
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