I’m 51 years old. I’ve lived all fifty-one of those years in the Puget Sound region, as did my parents, and my grandparents before me. People who fished, people who worked in the woods, people who grew their own food, and people who just spent a lot of time outdoors, generally speaking.
We know what the weather is like here. At least, we know what the weather USED to be like.
Now? Things are up in the air. Kind of like the high winds we’re having tonight.
Here are three new terms for extreme weather events that I never heard when I was growing up:
ATMOSPHERIC RIVER
“A narrow corridor or filament of concentrated moisture in the atmosphere. . . . The term was originally coined by researchers Reginald Newell and Yong Zhu of MIT in the early 1990s.” -Wikipedia
HEAT DOME
“A heat dome is a weather phenomenon consisting of extreme heat that is caused when the atmosphere traps hot air as if bounded by a lid or a cap.” -Wikipedia
BOMB CYCLONE
“Explosive cyclogenesis (also referred to as a weather bomb, meteorological bomb, explosive development, bomb cyclone, or bombogenesis, is the rapid deepening of an extratropical cyclonic low-pressure area . . . . bomb cyclones can produce winds of 74 to 95 mph … and yield heavy precipitation.” -Wikipedia
The high winds, waves, and resulting power outages we’re experiencing in our area tonight are the result of a “bomb cyclone”. Who knows if I’ll have power and an internet connection long enough to finish this post and hit publish? We’ll see!
While it does seem to me that we’re experiencing more extreme weather in the past decade, and that it’s getting observably worse and fast, I haven’t done as much personal research as I feel like I should to memorize and bolster my perception.
One of the things I wonder is if the new extreme terminology being used by weather reporters in the media is influencing my perception of rain, heat, and wind as I experience it in Western Washington state.
When it comes to heat domes, I think not. “Heat dome” is a relatively low-drama term for an oppressive, long-lasting, and terrifying weather event three years ago that was obviously off-the-charts for anyone who has lived here their whole life, and plants and animals native to the area. What we experienced in 2021 in the Pacific Northwest was unprecedented and deadly. It was not just hot; it had a character I have never experienced in any hot place having the same or higher temperatures elsewhere (for example, an unusually hot heat wave I was present for in New York City earlier in this century, an unusually hot heat wave in Albania I was present for in 1994, and just general super-hot temps traveling through and visiting Nevada, California, Arizona, and the Midwest). It was not just hot, or muggy, or hot AND muggy, but … you could feel that lid, and being trapped under it in that heat was frightening and unlivable – it was something you really just had to spend 24 hours a day trying to survive without air conditioning.
On top of the extreme temperatures and hellish qualities of the atmosphere was the timing / season of that 2021 heat dome; it hit at the end of June. Not even the 4th of July! We’re not talking about the 4th of July in Georgia, or Florida, or Texas. We’re talking about the 4th of July in the Seattle-Tacoma area, and in rural areas surrounded by evergreen temperate rain forests (NOT concrete). We’re talking about the 4th of July when in all my years living close to Seattle you could not even count on it being warm enough to go out in short sleeves on Independence Day. It is a surprise to have warm weather in June, and WILD AF to have HOT bathing-suit weather that time of year.
My experience and reading of local deaths during and after the 2021 event had as much of an impact on how I relate to people who are not from this region as the recent election results has had on how I relate to other voters in our country. Simply put, I do not trust people who aren’t from these parts to keep the Pacific Northwest and the people in it safe, and I do not believe they should be allowed to exploit, compromise or monkey with our resources and treasures, or to even talk about it like they know what the fuck they’re talking about when they DO NOT.
I am less certain of my objectivity when it comes to “atmospheric rivers”, but I think that may be because the heat dome in 2021 was so obviously EXTREME that I question my perception of the deluges we’ve experienced since I started hearing this term. When I was growing up I think we heard them referred to as rain resulting from tropical storms; what we heard was “Pineapple Express”.
Having said that, I kind of remember experiencing my first atmospheric river in recent years and noticing the quality of it was super different from any rain I’d experienced in the Puget Sound region before, and that when I saw/read/heard the term “atmospheric river” for the first time in reference to it after I’d already observed that rainstorm as weird and noteworthy, it made so much sense. I remember it really feeling not like heavy rain, but like someone tipped a tarp full of tons of rain over on us, and that it just kept DUMPING like that without ceasing or variation. Like it was really genuinely pouring from an expansive bottomless horizon-to-horizon well.
Okay, so you think it rains a lot in Seattle, right? Not really. It rains often, but that usual rain is drizzle. HEAVY rain is pretty abnormal. When we would get heavy rain it would be like a squall or a sudden downpour that didn’t last. This kind of atmospheric river rain is very different from the rain I grew up with and am used to. This rain doesn’t start and stop and start and stop, IT POURS ON AND ON AND ON AND ON AND ON. It really does feel like a river being dumped over and sent through a sieve with quite large holes.
But then I think … well, in 2002 I moved away from Tacoma (and before that away from the Snoqualmie valley created by the Cascade foothills). I’ve been living in a micro-climate for the past twenty-four years. Maybe I’ve just forgotten what “real” rain feels and sounds like? I had some pretty memorably hairy experiences driving in the rain in the 1990s that weren’t scary because I “didn’t know how to drive in the rain” (I did; that’s a stupid and dangerous criticism ignorant people level at drivers in WA who wisely lower their speeds according to conditions). In fact, I was in a freeway (I-5, Federal Way by the truck scales) accident involving 13 vehicles that made the TV news caused by people (myself included) driving too fast in the rain: a chain reaction that started with three semi trucks with trailers a little farther ahead of me, in the low-visibility distance. I remember a lot about that morning: what I was thinking (that I was surely going to die, for one, as I hurtled towards the bumpers of cars stopped dead in front of me and decided to strategically steer myself to hit two cars instead of just one in order to mitigate the impact on my body), my state of mind and where I was coming from, etc. Yes, it was raining heavily, but it was not this atmospheric river shit. It was normal-heavy rain, and some fog. And you know … road spray.
Anyway. I’m pretty sure after fifty-one years and a lot a lot a lot of driving, you get accustomed to the different sounds of different kinds of rain on different kinds of roofs. And since they started using the words “atmospheric river”, the sounds (and how long they’re sustained for) have been VERY different with increasing frequency in the past few years.
So what about these “bomb cyclone” windstorm-winds? Okay … I was relatively sheltered most of the time from high winds growing up in a valley. Though we lost power once or twice a year in our small town and someone did die from a tree falling on them in a windstorm, that seemed to have more to do with living around a lot of trees combined with increasing development, and nothing to do with extreme weather. I really only started experiencing windstorms in this century in this town we live in now (and I don’t even remember there ever being scary winds in the three different places and years I lived in Tacoma, even on the water). But there were definitely noteworthy, destructive windstorms in the 20th century, including in my own memory (the 1993 Inauguration Day Storm, for example).
So tonight we’re under warning for one of these bomb cyclone storms and it’s been crazy-gusty. This just after multiple days and nights of similar gale warnings, etc. over the past few weeks. Our house and property are surrounded by dozens of tall killer Douglas Fir trees that an arborist told our landlord should ALL be taken down for safety. It used to make me quite anxious in the windy months, but we’ve lived here for about thirteen years; I’m used to it now and it rarely elevates my heart rate. All of our trees seem MORE strong, not less.
I’m not (super) foolish, though; even though the trees are strong as a whole, they’re all prone to losing big branches and even their whole tops, especially in the first Fall storms when limbs have died over the summer and still could be broken or blown loose in the first strong winds. I heed the warnings and hurry when I have to go outside, and I have prepared bedding on the floor downstairs if sleeping upstairs seems too sketchy.
While I’m not super-confident in saying that the windstorms have gotten worse in recent years since I moved here in 2002, it does feel like big windstorms and warnings have gotten more frequent. But maybe they’re just better at issuing advisories and warnings? It is freaky when gusts of wind SLAM against the sides of the house and shake the whole entire structure, but I can’t recall if that’s a totally new sensation.
What I do know is that actual FUNNEL CLOUDS — actual tornadoes — started happening in recent years in places in Western Washington you never ever NEVER EVER heard of them, in King County, Kitsap County, etc., and even causing damage.
Looks like I made it through to post and publish this without losing electricity or web connectivity! And you’ve made it through almost 1,900 words – I’m impressed!
I’ve also arrived at some clarity; even though I don’t have all the stats and all of the information memorized to prove it to myself as far as these three types of weather events, I do believe and have observed that storms and heat seem to be getting more extreme where we live, and at least some of that is due to man-made climate change. I don’t know how much the words we’re using now to describe them influence my perception of them, but after writing about and reflecting on the atmospheric rivers, heat domes, and bomb cyclones I’ve experienced in the past few years compared to weather I experienced in the same region in the forty-plus years prior to that, I am more confident that my observations are mostly objectively-detached from the new, dramatic-sounding language used to report on these weather events, and that they are, indeed, getting more extreme, more frequent, and more dangerous.