Results tagged “cliffmass”

After our recent heat wave, UW meteorologist Cliff Mass emphasized that weather shouldn't be confused with climate change. Then he added, with scientific sangfroid, "I suspect mankind will not act fast enough to reduce fossil fuel use to stop large global warming effects and that we will learn to live with it."

It's the first day of real rain after a loooooooooong dry spell, and UW weather sage Cliff Mass says: Watch out! "During the dry period oil, dust and other debris collect on roadways and the addition of water produces a slippery emulsion." It certainly does, and you notice it taking the corners, or on a hill. That said, at the moment traffic flow looks pretty good.

Make no mistake about it. Last Wednesday was an epic event. The thermometer was just so many numbers. But no one who has lived here, in recorded history, had ever been through anything like it.

If you didn't stock up on fans, porches, and Mint Juleps this past weekend to brave the heat, you may want to rethink that decision. This week (and perhaps even longer) Seattle will be experiencing one helluva summer heat wave--to the point where an excessive heat warning has been issued for our area until Thursday, July 30.

The good news is that UW weather guru Cliff Mass says we're not looking at a record-breaking temperature spike coming up--but the bad news is that it's still a pretty sharp spike to be poked with. (In the same post he's got reader pics of noctilucent clouds, which, in a movie, would be a signal for supernatural doings afoot. Go take look. Real pretty.)

• Seattle Bubble has some fairly depressing graphs of job losses in the region. Why, graphs, why?
• MyBallard has info on the 10,000 or so people prepared to invade Greenwood tomorrow for the 50th Annual Greenwood Seafair Parade, including links showing which streets are closed.

The heat's already gotten to our squirrel neighbor, and it's just after nine a.m. KOMO says 85 degrees today, tops. Cliff Mass says in New England, people are complaining about their cold, dreary summer, but we've got temps in the 80s as far as next Monday.

We’ve spent the last two Junes bitching about the weather, so we are using this gloomy Friday to rave about all the blue sky and warm temperatures we’ve had so far. Seriously, Greek god of weather, get over here so we may perform many high fives.

The UW's weather guru Cliff Mass is part of a threesome that have appealed to the King County Superior Court to block the Seattle Public Schools' adoption of an inquiry-based math textbook series: Discovering Algebra, Discovering Geometry, and Discovering Advanced Algebra. In a press release, they argue that inquiry-based math instruction has resulted in a growing "achievement gap in mathematics among ethnic minority and free-lunch students in 4th, 7th, and 10th grades." The argument is also playing out in the op-ed pages of the Seattle Times, where a math teacher at Roosevelt responded to Mass's vocal criticism, oddly without including a single math-achievement benchmark that might sway us in favor of the series.

Multiple weatherological sources are saying if we can just hold out through showers today and tomorrow, we're headed to some mighty fine sunshine--in fact we might hit 70 by Thursday. We get a little weepy just thinking about it.

The P-I says that the Seattle school board voted to adopt (4-3) the Key Curriculum Press Discovering Mathematics textbooks series--for algebra, advanced algebra, geometry, pre-calculus and calculus classes across the district. (Statistics classes get an Addison-Wesley textbook.)

Cliff Mass says we got us a real frog-strangler bearing down on us. The storm should arrive in western Washington this afternoon, with winds and anywhere from a quarter to three-quarters of an inch of rainfall. The southwest side of the Olympics could get 2-4 inches, so if you want to play blue-tarp camper, this is your moment!

Yesterday we blogged about Cliff Mass's opinion on the high school algebra and geometry textbooks the school board is considering--and nobody with an opposing view commented. You'd think it was unanimous agreement. However, we were notified about this indignant response on Twitter: "Wow, I just lost all respect for the Seattlest - GG. http://bit.ly/1R3H08 Cliff Mass is an idiot. Agh so pissed off. Why can't ppl see that all the great minds are saying NOT TO lecture at kids or drill-n-kill. WELCOME TO OUR GENERATION!! Lets go to the weatherman for how we should teach math. EXCELLENT IDEA. Include all the rich white males from Bellevue while you're at it."

Tucked at the end of UW meteorologist Cliff Mass's post about the millions of square miles of low clouds over the ocean that will ruin our sun-loving lives for the foreseeable future is a PS about Seattle's high school math "situation" that we mentioned last week. Says Cliff: "I was amazed that three of them are still considering a terrible math series (Discovering Algebra, Discovering Geometry) that was found by the State Board of Education to be unsuitable. And dropped by San Diego as a failure." They lost us with the titles, for god's sake, but it helps to have Cliff weigh in with an expert opinion.

As Cliff Mass was pointing out during our monsoon yesterday, Sequim (pronounced "skwim" for the newbies) sits in a rain shadow and gets less rain, more sun. But before you move, owners of this Seattle house, check out the neighborhood--KOMO has a story on Sequimmers' distaste for lavender and fuschia paint. The extra sun doesn't seem to be translating to sunny dispositions.

We just added Q13's Parella Lewis to our Twittabase--we wanted to make sure we're bringing you a fair and balanced weather report--and already she's rewarded us by predicting a partly sunny weekend. Contrast this with Cliff Mass, working out of the notorious socialist stronghold of the UW, and his fixation on depressing graphs about the cold. As a caveat, four of Lewis's recent tweets mention drinking coffee to wake up and another one is a Thoreau quote, so it sounds like she's as desperate for sun as anyone else.

We were just reading the Weekly's conversation with Cliff Mass about global warming's effects on the Northwest: in the coming years, "late springs and early summers may actually be cooler--at least in the Western part of the state." Compare that with today's Seattle Times story on spring coming earlier around here: "Dozens of studies concur that the onset of spring--as measured by the response of plants, animals and ecosystems--is about a week earlier than it was 50 years ago," and Lake Washington's "spring cycle of warming and algae growth now start three weeks earlier than it used to." Spring comes earlier and gets colder. FAIL.

You may have noticed the snow flurries yesterday and this morning. Were you psyched about them? Even after Snowmaggedon '09, Seattlest can't seem to kick that momentary, childlike thrill when we see flakes drifting from the sky--but trust us, the thrill fades ever more quickly with each snowfall this year. According to Weather Underground, we're doomed to snow here and there throughout the day, but tomorrow looks clear and sunny. We're on a Winter Weather Advisory until Tuesday. Our weather guru, Cliff Mass, says "an inch or two is possible," and that "this really is quite extraordinary." Mmhmm. All we know is that the weather has us swapping tall tales about early summer blizzards with friends who've also done time in the Midwest.

• Big Blog won points with a post about The Bachelor's ex-wife and her YouTubed guest spot as a groupie on local band Out From Underneath's Seattle-heavy music video. Onwards and upwards, Gas Works Park.
• The blog formerly known as bigasscity is quoting none other than ZZ Top while crunching the numbers about Metro's projected budget shortfall and how much money the city could have saved by rejecting the bored tunnel viaduct replacement option.
• Cliff Mass thinks it's "pretty definite": we're looking at more snow, probably on Sunday. Actually, that works well with our schedule. How kind of the gods to check with Seattlest HQ's Google Calendar before sending the cold front!

That's what we hear from KIRO 7, anyway. Cliff Mass says the convergence zone--our nemesis!--is creating snow conditions above 500 feet. But wait! There's more! After a sunny Friday, a cold front moves in courtesy of our Canadian "friends," and on Sunday "the models are insistent about the creation of a Puget Sound convergence zone...and if they are right it will be cold enough for snow." Also, the temperatures might get down into the 20s for a few nights. What's that noise Sideshow Bob makes when a rake smacks him in the face? Yeah, we're making that noise.

At about 6:50 this morning, Metro's bus tracking service crashed, which meant that MyBus and OneBusAway were not delivering fresh data. Meteorologist Cliff Mass was having none of it, and made a call: "They promised that they are going to replace the servers of the bus track information system and this problem, which inconveniences hundreds or thousands of us unnecessarily, will be taken care of during the next month or so." Metro's press release sounds appropriately chastened: "Metro is already looking to next season by pursuing additional steps that can be taken to keep riders better informed of transit disruptions. Those actions include: redesigning elements of the Metro Online website; beefing up emergency event staffing plans for the Customer Information Office; adding additional staff to track and post bus reroute and service disruptions online; and exploring the use of emerging public communication tools to help disseminate information." Ooh, exploring! That's like when you get on a bus operating on an unpublished reroute!

TOWN HALL TWOSOME: We mentioned yesterday that blogging meteorologist Cliff Mass is showing up at Town Hall tonight (7:30 p.m., $5), but it's a tough choice, because Crosscut's Knute Berger and author Tim Egan are appearing to argue over what we think of as Berger's contrarian Bible: Pugetopolis: A Mossback Takes on Growth Addicts, Weather Wimps, and the Myth of Seattle Nice. God knows you should never take Berger seriously, but it should be entertaining. David Brewster will somehow find the time to moderate.

UW atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass became a local internet celebrity seemingly overnight during last year's Snowmageddon, when he was forecasting weather in circles around all the other so-called weathermen. In addition to his blog, he's got a book, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, that came out last fall. His next lecture, "The Secrets of Northwest Weather Prediction," is tomorrow night at Town Hall (7:30 p.m.). Tickets are $5.

If there's any good news in this, it's for skiers and snowboarders--Cliff Mass expects "1-2 feet snowfall at pass level and above by Friday." But he also says that despite considerable uncertainty in the models, there's perhaps a 50-60 percent chance of snow on Thursday morning. This is due to a cold front to arrive Wednesday night, an "upper trough," and that damn convergence zone. Stay tuned for our interview with Mass later this afternoon!

Cliff Mass says: "The latest prediction by the National Weather Service's Climatic Prediction Center is for cooler and wetter than normal conditions over the next month. Sounds like a La Nina forecast to me." Sweet. Cold and wet. If we were a mushroom, we'd be looking forward to that. In any event, you are now required to skip out of work any time there's sun over the next few days. Seattlest says so. Let us know if you need a permission slip.

Last night--see Exhibit A, to the right--we walked home in a snow flurry. This morning it's 25 degrees and sunny. Tomorrow, says Cliff Mass, it's back to a rainy gray: "Temps will warm rapidly as the associated front approaches and there should be considerable rain shadowing from Seattle northward. So it is possible that some locations will initially see some snow (particularly south Tacoma) that will turn to rain."

Cliff Mass says the inversion that's producing our film-noir quality fog will stick around through the weekend. If you want to skip the pea soupers, head to the hills. Mass reports that it was 66 degrees and clear on top of Tiger Mountain yesterday, and nearly 70 at Paradise on Rainier. By the way, weather groupies, Mass is signing his book at the UW Bookstore at 1 p.m. on Saturday.

Due to what Cliff Mass calls a "sharp inversion," we're freezing our foggy asses off down here in the lowlands while the mountains are a tropical summer fantasy.

We just ripped this off the teletype: FLOOD WATCH REMAINS IN EFFECT...FOR MUCH OF WESTERN WASHINGTON...FROM THIS EVENING THROUGH FRIDAY AFTERNOON STOP. Naturally we ran straight to Cliff Mass's house and pounded on the door. Turns out he was out back building an ark. "The high resolution WRF atmospheric model we run in the department (which I show you quite frequently) indicates the potential for 10-20 inches of rain over the next two days on the windward mountain slopes. We also couple the high resolution weather prediction models and hydrological models of stream flow. The results of the latest simulations are scary, with major flooding on several rivers," Cliff told us in that wry way he has. He was still hammering and sawing when we left.

For all those who feel they must leave their cozy beds this morning and brave the Metro wilds, the latest updates on snow-impacted bus routes can be found on the Ice & Snow page of Metro's website. Routes 1, 5, 7, 17, 18, 26, 27, 28, 42, 48, 73, 148, 175, 255 and 355 are currently affected. [Ed. note: We walked past the Metro 10 bus on its Broadway reroute this morning at 9 a.m., but can't find it listed now on the Metro adverse weather page Katelyn mentioned--so maybe it's back to running down 15th. Maybe not.]