Karl Bonner's Weather Blog

March 2017 has been extremely wet across the Pacific Northwest, but it hasn’t been particularly cold. My forecast for strong, 2009/2012-esque cold departures ended up busting completely, and temps are running very close to normal for the month. HOWEVER…our extremely cold and snowy winter has continued to cast its shadow over early spring. Cold temps in January and February meant that the tree sap and flower buds weren’t able to get the kind of “jump start” they can pull off…

Read More Read More

It was a beautiful early spring day in the Gorge for Equinox Eve: mostly clear skies, comfortably cool temps, and a dry and breezy east wind. Despite all the sunshine, temps in The Dalles were about 3 degrees below normal when you factor in both morning low AND afternoon high. The airport touched 57 degrees after a low of 32, but most spots in the Gorge topped out in the mid-50s today. Even the notorious icebox called Trout Lake, was…

Read More Read More

I was just looking forward to taking a break from weather blogging when THIS has to happen: That’s a landslide on West Burnside, a couple miles west of Downtown Portland. The airport has seen nearly 2” of rainfall in the past 48 hours, on top of a very wet February / early March. So the water-logged soil is prone to landslides. Also…the rising snow levels and rapidly melting snow in the Cascades, valleys in the Gorge, the High Desert, Blue…

Read More Read More

This is a posting of a blog entry from Facebook that never made it onto this site.  My apologies…because it’s a good tale of what is still theoretically possible in our climate in March. ======================= Yup, it’s time for one of those dramatic forecast titles.  For the past two or three days, model runs have been digging a cold and wet upper-level trough directly over us, beginning tomorrow Saturday and continuing through Tuesday morning.  This time it happens to be…

Read More Read More

The night before last around 12:30am, I noticed one or two lone frogs croaking outside, for the first time this season.  It was still chilly and foggy at the time, more like an early winter day in Eugene than just about anything else I could think of.  Then suddenly between 4:53 and 5:29am, the temperature at DLS airport jumped from 44 to 54 degrees, as a west wind kicked in at the surface.  Yesterday was partly sunny, windy and very…

Read More Read More

(more photos on the Facebook version of this post) It’s that time of year again.  Every year around the end of February / beginning of March I post all the signs of the coming spring in gardens and landscapes around The Dalles.  The past two late-winters were much warmer than this year, and thus the pre-vernal buds and flowers were much further along by this point.  In fact, we not only had daffodils in February 2015, but even a few…

Read More Read More