The Daily Bucket is a nature refuge. We amicably discuss animals, weather, climate, soil, plants, waters and note life’s patterns.
We invite you to note what you are seeing around you in your own part of the world, and to share your observations in the comments below.
Each note is a record that we can refer to in the future as we try to understand the phenological patterns that are quietly unwinding around us. To have the Daily Bucket in your Activity Stream, visit Backyard Science’s profile page and click on Follow.
We moved from Israel to Seattle in summer 2002. At first, there seemed no connection between the mostly-parched piece of Earth we’d left, straddling the boundary between the Mediterranean climate zone and the world’s largest contiguous hot desert — and the mild, wet Pacific Northwest between the Cascades and the Ocean. The dominant native tree in Israel-Palestine’s Mediterranean woodlands, usually takes the form of a bush no more than 3-5m tall. I love that “Common Oak”, but it’s a far cry from the awe-inspiring giants of PNW forests.
Then, after a while, I realized that the two climates are in fact siblings: both have dry summers and rainy mildly-cold winter. Yup, according to the great Köppen, both are members of the Mediterranean climate family! Siblings: Israel-Palestine, with its long bone-dry, often scorching hot summers, and mostly-clear winters interrupted by violent storms, would be the rugged, burly sibling. The PNW, with its short beautiful summers, and long, moody-gray, drizzly winters, definitely the spoiled pretty one. Gender them as you wish :)
Being siblings, sometimes they become more alike. With rapid human-caused global warming afoot, it is the cooler gentler clime who is inching towards its more southerly sibling.
While Seattle’s summer is dry, historically it hasn’t been bone-dry like Israel-Palestine, where from June through September there is essentially zero rain. In Seattle, on average there have been 40 mm in July-August combined, and a similar amount in June and September each, for a total of ~120mm over the 4-month period.
Enter 2017.
The last meaningful rains here fell in mid-June. Since then, over 12 weeks Seattle’s official weather station at Seatac airport recorded a total of 0.5mm (0.02”). In particular,
- Mid-June to early August we broke the record for consecutive days with no measurable rain (55), 4 days longer than the previous record.
- July-August were the driest on Seatac record, with said 0.5mm.
- August was the 3rd-hottest month and 2nd-hottest August in Seatac record.
- A smoky-air wave from B.C. in early August caused a week of Beijing-like air quality, with temperatures reaching the 90s. Last week saw a somewhat milder repeat, with the smoke arriving from a shorter distance and therefore accompanied by visible ash pieces.
If last winter wasn’t the… (you guessed it?) ...WETTEST on Seatac record, we’d be much deeper down the drought hole we’re currently in.
But why blame global warming for one unusual year? Perhaps because…
- The 1st-hottest month on Seatac record (in terms of overall average temps) is August 2015.
- 2014 wasn’t too shabby either, with wildfires shutting down Eastern Washington for most of the summer.
- July-October 2012 had a dry spell eerily similar to 2017 (sans the smoke), including the 3rd-longest zero-precipitation stretch, and the first calendar month with not even a trace of rain (August 2012).
- Seattle’s hottest day was in July 2009 with nearly 40C, again breaking the previous record by a considerable margin of 2 degrees C (3-4F).
Ok, I’ve bored your brains to death. Without further ado:
Since her adoption in March 2011, Lila has brought infinite joy to our lives. In a household of 4 males with various shades of ADD, and a mom toughened up first by growing up on a farm with 2 older brothers, and then by enduring said males — Lila is a much-needed source of affection and tenderness for all.
The search for new daily routes to walk with Lila, finally bumped me in April 2011 into that gem hiding literally under our noses, a mere half-km from home where we’d lived for over a year before that: Thornton Creek Kingfisher natural area. It’s very small, but it might be the wildest, lushest patch of canyon within city limits. The stumps of old-growth cut by early Euro-American invaders are still visible.
Lila, me, and occasionally additional companions, have visited the trail in weather ranging from snow to heat wave. But recently, it was just getting ever so drier, dustier, with growing incursions of yellow into the green.
We are now 7 days before the Fall Equinox. It drizzled a bit on Saturday in some of the region, but nothing measurable in Seatac or in our neighborhood. There’s some rain forecast for Sunday the 17th — the first meaningful rain since mid-June, and after that “a chance of showers”. Barring a sudden major downpour, this will likely be the driest-recorded Solstice-to-Equinox period in Seattle (this period is often defined as “Northern Summer”, and in the PNW this definition is as adequate as anywhere) - by a wide margin.
On some deep emotional level, experiencing summers that are closer to what I’ve grown up on, rather than the usual too-short, occasionally-rainy, too-mild Seattle variety, is appealing to me. It has also enabled me to nearly complete a “deck dentistry” project over the past few weeks.
But it comes at a steep price. While native evergreen conifers have evolved to withstand dry summers here, a sequence of too-hot too-dry summers might do serious damage to the forests around here, and not just via wildfire.