I’m on the road and won’t be around to comment but since there’s no Bucket to put this into a comment, I’ll just toss this up as quickie since it’s time-sensitive, and I’m not the only one who has been asking the question above.
In a nutshell, the Gigantic Storm we were warned about yesterday barreling into the Pacific Northwest with 70 knot winds, massive power outages, etc, did not show up. It got plenty windy up in the northern Salish Sea where I live, but no windier than a typical winter storm, with 30+ knots at its peak around 7pm. Folks in Seattle got zip I hear.
So what happened??
According to Steve Sistek in a blog post at KOMO News in Seattle (komonews.com/...), the Portland NWS office noticed an anomaly in the surface winds, using a tool called Advanced Scatterometer from Satellites. Rather than a single low pressure center there were actually two, which acted to “fight for energy”, significantly weakening all the winds.
It’s interesting no other meteorologists noticed this when formulating their models. Weather prediction is an extremely complex and dicey challenge since there are so many dynamic variables, in four dimensions. Meteorologists use lots of different kinds of data gathering technology as well as computing software. Somehow this bit of data didn’t get into the modeling. Perhaps not everyone has access to ASCAT?
It’s tough being a weather forecaster, and easy to mock them, but I for one am just as happy we didn’t get massive destruction and lives lost. That said, I had to laugh at a meme going around:
If no Bucket goes up today, consider this it, and please fill it.
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