raindancewx

Albuquerque has had two or three flash flood warnings this July. Something like 0.02" at the airport those days, with 3-5 inches elsewhere in the city. Just ridiculously localized events. Drought has really been getting it's ass kicked though. National pattern this month has some resemblance to July 2013, so not too surprising. I'm leaning toward an early peaking very weak La Nina Modoki this winter, with the North Pacific very warm basin wide and a relatively cool eastern Atlantic. There are a lot of ways to match what the CFS shows for the winter sea surface temperatures, but I think 2016 + 1960 or 1967, blended with more recent years is probably the it will go. Something like a blend of 1960-61, 1967-68, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2016-17, 2020-21 gets you the right PDO/AMO/Solar/Modoki/low sea ice configuration at about the right ENSO strength. Still a lot of refining to do on my end though.

To me, and this isn't my forecast - I'll link it here when I finish by 10/10/21 - the CFS SST anomaly forecast looks like a blend of 1960-61, 1967-68, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2016-17 and 2020-21, with weak La Nina Modoki peaking NDJ, around 150W at it's core. I warmed up the oceans by 0.2C to account for the warming from the average analog date of 1997 (~0.2C of warming for 24 years). It's hard to match that level of warmth east of Japan - I think it will spread out more than what the model shows. The weaker tendency for cold ENSO by South America looks correct to me. December 1960 / 1967 are actually stupid cold in some places nationally, but it gets wiped out by the other years for the default "warm Nino 4" look we so often see in recent Decembers. That said, I do think something similar to December 1960 is possible nationally if things break a certain way over the next few months. These winters where all four Nino zones are convective-ly shut down or diminished seem to be the most volatile of the cold ENSO years.

You can see compared to last year, this event has developed differently. Western origin in 2021 v. Eastern origin in 2020. Nino 1.2 and Nino 3 were both very cold already last year. But, Nino 4 was still pretty normal. Last year shifted from being coldest East to coldest West. My current sense is you won't see a big shift to the Eastern Zones coldest. But that's something to look for in the coming months. 10JUN2020 22.2-1.0 25.7-1.0 27.1-0.7 28.8-0.2 17JUN2020 22.2-0.7 25.7-0.8 27.2-0.6 29.1 0.1 24JUN2020 21.6-1.0 25.8-0.5 27.6-0.0 29.3 0.3 01JUL2020 21.1-1.2 25.5-0.6 27.3-0.2 29.1 0.1 08JUL2020 21.1-0.9 25.3-0.6 27.2-0.3 29.1 0.1 15JUL2020 20.2-1.5 25.1-0.7 27.0-0.3 28.8-0.1 22JUL2020 20.2-1.3 25.0-0.7 26.8-0.5 28.7-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 07JUL2021 22.2 0.1 26.0-0.0 27.4-0.0 28.9-0.1 14JUL2021 22.2 0.4 25.9 0.1 27.2-0.1 28.6-0.4 21JUL2021 22.1 0.6 25.2-0.4 26.8-0.5 28.5-0.4 For my purposes, La Nina conditions in July or August should be 0.5C below the reading observed from 1951-2010. So for July, that's 26.54C or colder, and 26.15C or colder for August. CPC uses 26.79C as -0.5C for July and 26.36C as -0.5C for August using the most recent 30-year period. I think those thresholds are too warm to sync correctly with La Nina conditions. You can see sort of see that with the cold south look for this month.

Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 07JUL2021 22.2 0.1 26.0-0.0 27.4-0.0 28.9-0.1 14JUL2021 22.2 0.4 25.9 0.1 27.2-0.1 28.6-0.4 21JUL2021 22.1 0.6 25.2-0.4 26.8-0.5 28.5-0.4 Haven't run it yet, but we'll interesting finding years with +May, +Jun, -Jul subsurface readings. We're probably going to flip into a Modoki La Nina in August, and then it may spread east later.

Should probably start looking at cold-ENSO years with weakening drought in NM/TX/AZ in May-July given how wet we've been lately. This tends to happen pretty reliably after we get our 600 decameter bs down here (we had record cold and rain in June too after, similar to the wet period following a hot period/strong high now), not that anyone ever rolls those events forward.

My NAO method doesn't work until September finishes, but just as a gut take, I thought this would be another winter with significant NAO volatility. Historically, you don't get ever get -NAO in February after a warm Nino 4 February (one year lag v. 28.85C if memory serves) using the 1981-2010 NAO baseline. You don't have that issue this year. Locally, the tendency in cold ENSO years is for July/Dec, and Aug/Feb to be negatively correlated twins. So when July is warm, I look for a cold December (worked last year), and when August is warm I look for a cold February. We had all time record heat in August last year, and then severe cold in February. August looks much colder here than 2020, which is consistent with a warmer West late winter/March and/or -NAO February/March (probably as an El Nino begins to rapidly develop late winter if I had to guess). Generally if it is very wet in the Southwest the final week of July, you guys in the East get your big Christmas warm up with a big low moving out of the Southwest. The monsoon has been pretty unusual (and non-traditional) and robust this year, so we'll see how that goes soon enough.

Exact Nino 3.4 July monthly figure will be interesting. From 1950-2020, the DJF value hasn't dropped off by more than ~1.8C from that level, and typically ~90%+ of the time, you'd get a smaller or much smaller drop off, even in a La Nina. ~27.25C in July and then a 1.75C drop to DJF would be around the 90-99th percentile for a drop, and still only as strong as last year. So a warmer cold ENSO event is the likely outcome. That said, 2017 had the 1.8C drop from July to DJF. The CFS doesn't really favor anything more than a whisper of cold at the moment for what it's worth. But it changes all the time. It has a weak modoki La Nina or cold Neutral - a few days ago it had no blue in Nino 3.4/4 at all.

Should be another pretty weird winter nationally. My hunch is we get a pretty rapid collapse in any La Nina / near La Nina that peaks around 11/1 in late winter. Then warms up from the east like a diet Spring 1997 by Spring 2022. La Nina with rapidly rising solar activity on a July-June annualized basis is kind of unusual if that's what we get. La Nina + Declining Solar (1930-2020): 1933-34, 1938-39, 1942-43, 1949-50, 1950-51, 1964-65, 1970-71, 1971-72, 1973-74, 1974-75, 1975-76, 1983-84, 1984-85, 1995-96, 1998-99, 1999-00, 2005-06, 2007-08, 2008-09, 2016-17, 2017-18 La Nina + Rapidly Rising Solar (1930-2020): 1955-56, 1956-57, 1988-89, 2010-11, 2011-12 La Nina + Weakly Rising (1930-2020): 1954-55, 2000-01, 2020-21 A lot of the "near" La Nina Neutrals are in the rising solar category too. It's definitely interesting that the three "weakly rising" La Ninas are all pretty cold for La Ninas where I am, with pretty substantial cold dumps that repeated cyclically on a national basis. Years Jul-Jun 1931 25.1 1932 14.5 1933 9.1 1934 27.6 1935 97.0 1936 172.8 1937 180.8 1938 171.6 1939 125.9 1940 94.4 1941 76.5 1942 33.9 1943 14.2 1944 33.8 1945 95.8 1946 197.9 1947 205.9 1948 194.4 1949 164.9 1950 103.4 1951 62.8 1952 36.4 1953 9.5 1954 19.2 1955 119.8 1956 237.6 1957 281.6 1958 255.4 1959 184.2 1960 116.6 1961 67.1 1962 42.2 1963 29.1 1964 16.6 1965 37.1 1966 104.2 1967 145.0 1968 155.7 1969 148.6 1970 115.7 1971 100.5 1972 75.4 1973 44.8 1974 34.6 1975 23.6 1976 23.2 1977 84.1 1978 169.9 1979 233.4 1980 199.1 1981 195.5 1982 129.2 1983 82.7 1984 25.9 1985 16.1 1986 19.1 1987 65.3 1988 182.8 1989 200.7 1990 200.8 1991 177.8 1992 103.3 1993 53.8 1994 36.9 1995 14.9 1996 14.5 1997 54.9 1998 115.2 1999 163.2 2000 163.4 2001 176.0 2002 131.0 2003 82.0 2004 55.3 2005 34.7 2006 20.1 2007 7.2 2008 2.3 2009 13.2 2010 44.0 2011 94.0 2012 87.4 2013 108.7 2014 90.7 2015 55.8 2016 28.5 2017 15.0 2018 5.5 2019 2.1 2020 16.1

The top matches in Nino 3, 3.4, and Nino 4 for Apr-Jun are below. The July weeklies have 26.0C currently in Nino 3, well warm of the top Nino 3 matches for Apr-Jun. Nino 3.4 in July is a bit better, still trending like 1986 and 2001. The best Apr-Jun match overall is 1967. That winter is crazy (go look Dec 1967 US temps), and one of the very coldest Nino 3 winters on record even though 3.4 isn't that cold. The matches for 1967, 1986, 1996, 2001 are pretty solid for AMJ. 60-yr in green is the 1951-2010 average by month. My gut instinct after last winter was we'd have kind of a cold-neutral Modoki La Nina look to 2021-22. That's kind of where we are now - but it's unlikely to hold through winter. July 1961 is also a fairly decent SST match in the Pacific/Atlantic. Terrible IOD match though, so probably won't hold.

Clouds are difficult to study. Shape, size, location, color all change very quickly. Even something like a count of the clouds is hard. How many clouds are in the GIF below would you say?

One thing to keep in mind too is the subsurface still isn't super-reliable as an indicator in July. If you went by this image, 2016 was the big La Nina relative to 2017. But it wasn't. It was already dead in February in February 2017. The 2017-18 was much more powerful, just started later.

I ran the numbers for April-June monthly conditions in Nino 3, Nino 3.4, and Nino 4. The best single match is 1967. But it is a terrible match to actual weather in the US. The other years that come up in multiple zones are all over the place for conditions. The general theme was years that match best to Apr-Jun become La Nina or Neutral winters...but they fade quickly to El Ninos in late winter. April-June 1959 is also a shockingly good match to April-June 2021 for US precipitation. Best match easily since the 1890s. I've mentioned I'm looking at 1959-1962 as a period for potential winter analogs - so this does support that.

Would be more meaningful if clouds were you know...stuck in place, steady in size, of consistent shape and arriving at constant times. I can't see the paper behind the paywall to see the methodology used. But my understanding was part of the reason studying clouds was hard is because most of the Earth is salt water at the surface, and it's hard to get ground observations of clouds that are reliable over a long period over the vast majority of the Earth. Satellites are better than ground observations at some things, but not everything. The other issue with studying clouds is that they'll likely arrive and develop from different places if the climate changes dramatically in a given spot over the coming decades. The changing origin of the clouds (or even introduction of extra sunlight / cloudiness in a over time) is more relevant long-term. More philosophically, you have different amounts of cloudiness not just by region but by time. So the effects from changing clouds would be by time of day, time of year, and then layered on top of the general pervasiveness of clouds in a region. Presumably, it's not a big deal where I am as we have something like weeks-months of near cloud free days per year, whereas Seattle or Boston would have the opposite, very few true cloud-free days. More generally, these papers usually ignore "ground clouds" like fog, freezing fog, mist, dust, haze, pollution, and so on. Not to mention the differences in terrain with rapid elevation changes where effects like shadows near dawn and dusk take effect and can interact with the "angles" of clouds so to speak. You can be shadowed from a cloud that isn't over head at the right time of day and so on.

Drought has really been getting it's ass kicked in recent weeks. Not drought busting, but drought denting for sure.

Subsurface has flipped negative this week which is a good sign for a La Nina. July should be near neutral or slightly negative for the subsurface. Still need to cool the surface a lot though. Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 07JUL2021 22.2 0.1 26.0-0.0 27.4-0.0 28.9-0.1 14JUL2021 22.2 0.4 25.9 0.1 27.2-0.1 28.6-0.4 Here is last year for comparison. We're nowhere near as cold overall. I know people talk about 2020-21 as a Moderate La Nina, but in winter, if you use 26.5C as average, it was a weak La Nina, and barely spent any time as a moderate. Only two months were -1.0C or colder v. the 1951-2010 monthly averages. We're running +0.2C or so warmer currently than 2020 in Nino 3.4, which finished at -0.9C (25.57C or so) in winter. 03JUN2020 23.1-0.4 26.0-0.8 27.3-0.5 29.0 0.0 10JUN2020 22.2-1.0 25.7-1.0 27.1-0.7 28.8-0.2 17JUN2020 22.2-0.7 25.7-0.8 27.2-0.6 29.1 0.1 24JUN2020 21.6-1.0 25.8-0.5 27.6-0.0 29.3 0.3 01JUL2020 21.1-1.2 25.5-0.6 27.3-0.2 29.1 0.1 08JUL2020 21.1-0.9 25.3-0.6 27.2-0.3 29.1 0.1 15JUL2020 20.2-1.5 25.1-0.7 27.0-0.3 28.8-0.1 The current 'colder Nino 4' v. 'warmer' Nino 1.2/3 look is opposite July 2019/2020. Somewhat like 2012 and 2011. A blend of 2011/2012 is pretty close in all four zones currently. 06JUN2012 24.7 1.3 27.1 0.3 27.8 0.0 28.6-0.4 13JUN2012 24.4 1.3 27.1 0.5 27.9 0.2 28.6-0.4 20JUN2012 24.3 1.5 27.1 0.6 28.0 0.3 28.8-0.2 27JUN2012 23.8 1.4 27.1 0.8 28.1 0.5 28.9-0.1 04JUL2012 23.2 1.0 26.8 0.7 27.9 0.4 28.8-0.2 11JUL2012 22.6 0.7 26.6 0.7 27.7 0.3 28.8-0.2 01JUN2011 24.3 0.7 26.8-0.0 27.5-0.3 28.4-0.6 08JUN2011 24.2 0.9 26.7-0.0 27.5-0.3 28.4-0.5 15JUN2011 23.8 0.8 26.6 0.0 27.4-0.3 28.4-0.6 22JUN2011 23.2 0.5 26.5 0.1 27.4-0.2 28.4-0.6 29JUN2011 22.9 0.5 26.1-0.1 27.4-0.2 28.6-0.4 06JUL2011 22.2 0.2 25.8-0.2 27.1-0.4 28.5-0.5 13JUL2011 21.9 0.1 25.7-0.1 27.1-0.3 28.5-0.4 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 07JUL2021 22.2 0.1 26.0-0.0 27.4-0.0 28.9-0.1 14JUL2021 22.2 0.4 25.9 0.1 27.2-0.1 28.6-0.4

Last year, the La Nina was here in August, and it arguably peaked right around Halloween, before dying off in March/April. Some of the other things I look at favor a pretty warm winter down here (it's actually been several years since we've had a hot winter), but I don't expect the precipitation totals to be as dire as last year or 2017-18 if a late forming La Nina develops. The SOI has magically shot up to near +12 in recent days, so the indicators still lean cold ENSO in some form. April-June all had neutral SOI values for comparison. Will run the figures against the long-term data when July is over.

The +NAO correlation for June to July actually looks a bit like the July 2021 temperature pattern so far. The 1959-60 winter looked like 2020-21 winter at times (Dec & Feb) and then occasionally matched in Spring. July has been decent as a match to 1960 too. I've been watching 1960 because it is a year following the similar weird "very cold Nino 4" + "somewhat negative NAO winter" + "very positive WPO winter" of 1959-60.

From 1950-2020, the Nino 3.4 reading in September has never dropped by more than 1C by the following DJF, despite model predictions last fall of a -1.5 or -2.0 level event in winter (25.0C or colder). June finished at 27.48C in Nino 3.4. So the question is...what is the transition from June to September? July looks like it will be at coldest 27.0C, and even that assumes rapid cooling late month. Last July was 26.99C in Nino 3.4, I'd say the first half of July 2021 is 27.4C or so. August 2020 then fell to 26.26C. That's a pretty cold reading for that early in the year. The subsurface for July so far is still slightly positive. It was already -0.18 last year. I would never really rule out a La Nina at this juncture, but it's either a late bloomer kind of like how 2017 was, or a much weaker one than last year. I still lean Neutral. Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 07JUL2021 22.2 0.1 26.0-0.0 27.4-0.0 28.9-0.1

The subsurface is still holding on to some warmth. If you look at 2016 or 2017, July is when all the orange and red gets flushed out completely on these images. It hasn't really happened yet. My hunch is we'll see a winter ENSO pattern a bit like one of the years from 1959-1962 for the winter. Those are neutral patterns, but there are blotches of warmth and cold in different months in different spots. Some pretty interesting winters actually. The weird -Nino 4 / ++ WPO / -NAO combo from last year was reminiscent at times of 1959-60. You can see it pretty clearly looking at Dec/Feb in 2020-21 v. 1959-60.

The cold ENSO years starting 2007 with very low sea ice (4.3 million square km or lower mins in Sept) have all been cold somewhere in the West in winter (2007-08, 2011-12, 2012-13, 2016-17. 2020-21) while the higher sea-ice cold ENSO years have not been (2008-09, 2010-11, 2013-14, 2017-18). That's something I'm watching. Certainly worked here last year. Late Summer, July-September is pretty well correlated to how warm Nino 3.4 is in March-May. You would think we'd see a pretty different late Summer pattern from last year. I've actually been sold on a near average or cold August out here for a while for a few reasons - two near record hot Augusts in a row are unlikely to repeat with a third. More generally, this also looks like a more active East Pacific hurricane season than last year to me which can help crush heat in the Southwest in August. Hot La Nina years in the Southwest tend to see late developing heat (90+ readings). So it didn't reach 90 until June here, which is late. But if the sea ice is low, that hasn't failed since 2007 as a "cold somewhere in the West" signal in the low ENSO years. Would be interesting to see those two stats locally go against each other. I'm also starting to wonder if the level of rain by the New Mexico & Texas border the past 60 days is enough to prevent a big high from settling in there for a while. I knew back in Spring May would be a decent month out here just because the November NAO (+) is highly correlated to wet Mays when positive, and so is the January WPO (+) - and both were extremely/record positive. The extreme drought for New Mexico has been been cut in half since 1/1 according to Uncle Sam.

Nino1+2 Nino3 Nino34 Nino4 Week SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA SST SSTA 02JUN2021 23.2-0.4 26.6-0.2 27.6-0.2 28.8-0.2 09JUN2021 23.2-0.0 26.7-0.0 27.8-0.0 28.9-0.1 16JUN2021 23.3 0.4 26.0-0.5 27.2-0.5 28.8-0.2 23JUN2021 22.9 0.2 26.3-0.0 27.6-0.0 29.0 0.0 30JUN2021 22.6 0.3 26.2 0.0 27.5-0.1 28.8-0.1 June monthly data crossed into positive territory (more El Nino like than La Nina) against the 1951-2010 baseline I like to use for ENSO. Even against the more recent 30-year period, we're solidly Neutral now. We're still tracking fairly similarly to 2012 and 2013 in Nino 3.4 for the year. The June figure is also close to 2016 now.

The attribution science assumes that some link between the Earth warming an extreme event can be found. But...it does it after it happens. To me that's like saying I studied that a big steak filled me up more than two slices of bread. I don't think it has any use. I know I complain about the math, but it's really more the philosophy that bugs me. You can predict after every single unusual weather event than a scientist will say it is Global Warming that contributed to the event. The public doesn't care because the public already knows the scientists will say that. People have no use for knowing that a specific unusual regional weather outcome in the future is linked to the Earth warming if there is no specific timeline for when it will or won't happen. The weather has always been pretty terrible at times, and people have always had to adapt to it, it's just now the adaptations are all toward the warming changes rather than more erratic changes. You can't do anything useful behaviorally from knowing that a rare event was linked to changes in the Earth's temperature. Are people in Portland going to give up their cars? You might think they'd buy air conditioning, but you had a pretty big heat wave in the Northwest in July 2009 and even that didn't happen to a large extent, and it's not like the population stopped growing out there in the 1800s when they had prior less intense heat waves before cooling systems and things like cold bottled water were available. I don't see the point of any of it. If you're talking about something like water in the West, most of the states have had 10 to 100x increased population compared to 100 or 200 years ago, so even in a colder or wetter climate you'd have water and other resource shortages with poor planning. You would have had to divert water resources anyway out here just from the order of magnitude in the population growth (New Mexico went from 327,000 in 1910 around statehood to 2,100,000 now as an example, and even in the 1800s Mark Twain was noting the rivers rain dry, and most of the West has seen far faster growth). https://www.carbonbrief.org/mapped-how-climate-change-affects-extreme-weather-around-the-world

Euro keeps missing the boat on the Nino 4 readings. Whole plume should shift warmer though.

I wasn't trying to argue that the specific +40 or +50 readings are not super rare. I think those are flukish and not normally distributed at all. In fact, I ran some of the figures for the NW and Canada in sites with 100+ years of records and they don't really pass some of the normality tests depending on what you're looking for. I can tell you locally, precipitation and snow are the same way, unless filtered by ENSO. So I'm not a big fan of that premise. My focus was more on the general +30 and +35 zone. I think with enough +30 events, you have to look at it as inevitable that some spot somewhere would greatly exceed the general trend. My math was my daily estimate for +35 odds, not +40 or +50. I do think it's well under 1 in 200,000 for a spot to hit +30 in a given day. It's not really that rare in the way we perceive time with so many days. My assumption here is if the high was as strong, but 15 miles displaced in a parallel universe Earth but the same pattern existed, you'd have different sinking air through the valleys and then the sea breeze would behave differently too. You'd end up with a different collection of records by magnitude and space. That's why it's so dumb to me to attribute the +50 or the +40 to climate change. You should be trying to figure out if this setup exactly or with slightly different positioning is going to happen again, or if next time the high will be as strong, but with a sea breeze allowing Seattle to be 78 while Spokane is 110. Most of the research I see is only about "proving" the Earth is warming to show the science is settled using poorly calculated probabilities, which is dumb, if you believe it is settled as the scientists surely do. I really don't have an issue with the general idea of warming, but the way the science is used in situations is borderline useless, since no one knows if this will happen later again this Summer or in 5,000 years, even if the odds favor it happening more.

I would say to add to this, that each climate region / zone is akin to a slot machine with specific odds for an extremely unlikely event. The odds of a jackpot in the Northwest are apparently much higher in Summer for record heat than where I live in the mountains of the Southwest as an example. How do I know that? In Albuquerque, the all-time record high is 107. The highs reach 72 in mid-April peak at 92 in late June to early August, then fall back to 72 in mid-October. That means you have a six month period, for 1892 to 2020, which is 128 complete years at 183 days per year, when 35 degrees above average is less than 1/23,000+ odds, just going by the observations. That's even including substantial warming in that time frame. That's what I mean when I say the bigger effects are from climates changing climate zone/type. Seattle and Portland are perfectly capable of warming up rapidly by drawing up hot desert air in the Summer that sinks from the East rather than cool Maritime air from the West or cold Arctic air from the North. New Mexico is hot regardless, because whether from the south or east or north or west, the surrounding is hot. NM won't see +35 because in that six month time frame since there is no source region of air hot enough to put 127 degrees at 5,300 feet above sea level in July, or 107 in April or October. The issue with this type of math is that the odds reset each day. It's not 1/23,000+ for Albuquerque to hit +35 for the half year, or 1/10,000 for Portland to do it in the Summer. It's each day. I know some spots hit +50, but the general area was more like +35. Given that we just had multiple days of record readings, all concentrated in the same area, it's pretty obvious that because of the exposure to cold in the Arctic/ very wet Pacific air/ very hot desert air from the Southwest, that the odds of a +35 day in the Northwest in the Summer are actually way better than the <1/23,000 per day floor here. If you split the Earth into 200 pieces, I would bet the average frequency for extremes resemble what I have observed in my lifetime. I am going to be 34 in September. In my lifetime, living in Philadelphia, London, and Albuquerque, I have experienced something like 5-10 days that were more than 30 degrees above or below the long-term average high for the place. Philadelphia had a high of 6 in 1994, that's out by +30. Off the top of my head, I remember some mid 80s pool parties in March 1990 and 1998, a 95 in April 2002, 23 in March 1996 after the very cold winter. That's my guess for most extreme in Philadelphia. It snowed when I was in London in October 2008, but that's not 30 out, despite being part of that record wave (their earliest snow since 1934). In Albuquerque, there was a high of 9 (-42) and then 18 in February 2011, a high of 20 (-33) in February 2021. That's it -seven (ish) days, with a few others right probably pretty close. So based on my random sampling of Earth's climate, I've experienced 7/ ~12,400 days more than 30 degrees above or below the average high, roughly 1/1,800. I'd imagine that's closer to the figure for the extreme heat, with the recognition, that those odds are for each day. That's also why you see the extremes so often. Using my lifetime, it would be: 1 in 1,800 odds for a +/-30 high, every day, run every day for each climate, since each day has a different weather pattern globally. The other simpler issue is if you scan old newspaper and magazine accounts, you do have a lot of accounts of pretty extreme temps even in the 1800s in the Northwest. Some of the records online are free, like the one, others are behind paywalls from things like the NYT. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/sites/default/files/march-1887-monthly-weather-review-final.pdfvia: United States of America War Department, Monthly Weather Review for 1882, Washington D.C lists the data below The following are the highest temperatures observed during July 1882 in the United States: Fort Lapwai, Idaho (113° F, 45.0° C) Umatilla, Oregon (105° F, 40.6° C) Alamota, Washington (105° F, 40.6° C) One report says: In August 1889, forest fires raged in California, Idaho, Washington, Michigan, Montana, Oregon and Wyoming in the United States. At Seattle, Washington, for several weeks, this region was clouded by smoke, caused by extensive forest fires in every direction. The entire eastern slope of the Cascade Mountains, from Natchez Pass north to the boundary was in flames. At Helena, Montana, destructive forest fires prevailed during the entire month of August. The fire consumed many million feet of lumber and thousands of acres of timber. Another report says Walla Walla hit 108 degrees in July 1891 as an example (pretty close still to the 114 record that stood from 1961 to a few days ago), with Portland at 102. I'm assuming with the current average July high of 89 or so in Walla, it was probably 85 or 86 back in the day, so just as now, you had +30 Summer days against the background of the climate state. I personally think the idea that the probability curve is what is changing for these events is sort of wrong. The events at the far end of the normal distribution are still very rare, they're just somewhat warmer when they do happen. If you change a spot from averaging 70 degrees to 72 degrees annually, and the physical limit of the spot is +/-35 v. the average, people can adapt to it. The issue would be if you changed from 70 to 72 and also shifted to a different climate zone, and suddenly +40 and -40 events became as routine as the +30 or -30 events against the 72 baseline. That's why that "record heat SW" thread has no real activity. It's great that you're concerned that we had a 600 decameter high. We'll have another one this week, and just like the last one, people here won't even notice.