Happy New Year!

Well 2019 is toast and we are now marching into a new decade. December weather wise went out with a bit of a warm whimper.

December had no really cold mornings and daily averages were about 3 above normal on both ends of the day. We had a month filled with clouds and rain which is typical, but the amount of rain was still only about 65% of normal at my locations and similar results were measured around the metro area. Had it not been for a light round of flurries very late on November 30th that carried over to December 1st in the early AM I would have had the first December in five years with zero snow. As it was the snow was barely measurable and did not make it to sunrise.

We do really need some epic levels of precipitation. The last several years have been sub par on rainfall. I hope this new year provides some needed rain and snow.

Temps were not drastic on either extreme just a bit warmer on average overall. The average overnight low came it at a warm 36.95° more than 3° above normal and the average high was nearly equally warm at 46.25° nearly 3° over. The coldest overnight low was 28° on the 26th, which is a garden variety value for a cloudless night in December. Yawn. That was one of only three nights under 30° and just seven nights with freezing temps. The warmest overnight low was a shocker when the merc manged to stay above 50°, yes FIFTY degrees for the low. That occurred on the 20th when the thermometer bottomed out at a balmy 50.2° which ultimately led to the warmest day of the month when it reached 56.3° later in the day. The chilliest afternoon high was a crisp 38.5° on Christmas Eve which as it turned out was the only day that failed to reach 40°. December had four days that manged to push the red line into the 50's.

Overall we did not even come anywhere near any daily record lows nor did we come anywhere near the coldest daytime highs of Decembers past. It wasn't that the temperature was excessively warm last month, it was on average three degrees, it was just so consistently warm rather than a bunch of extremes.  It was simply warm for December, the whole month. I did set one local daily high temp record on the 20th when that 56.3° temp was recorded.

The precipitation side of last month was equally boring. We had one pineapple express event that dropped nearly half of the month's rainfall over a three day period from the 19th through the 21st during which 2.48 inches fell including the wettest day of the whole YEAR at 1.02 inches on the 21st. December yielded 9 days with over a quarter inch of rain and 14 days with measurable precipitation. The aforementioned snow was barely measurable with a total of just a few millimeters on the early morning of the 1st that briefly accumulated to about 0.1 inch.

The year ended with 138 sunny days, 107 rainy days, and 14 days with snow or ice. On the cold side we had 59 sub freezing mornings, 3 sub 20° mornings, only 13 days that failed to reach 40° and every single day in 2019 manged to make above the freezing mark by afternoon. The coldest overnight low was a chilly 19.4° and the coldest daytime high was 34.5° both of these were in March! A total of 8.3 inches of snow fell with nearly all of it coming in February. That snow total was a tad under my 19 year average. Rainfall for the calendar year of 2019 (rainfall is typically measure seasonally from September to August), was only 26.63 inches about HALF of my local normal of 53.36 inches. It's time for us all to do a rain dance, we need it!

On the warm side of things, we had absolutely no days at 100° or more, and only nine days that busted into 90s. 190 days managed to climb to 60° or more, and the hottest temp was 98.8°. The warmest overnight low was a warm and cozy, 65.5°.

We have a fabulous northern maritime climate here that just tends to avoid the extremes. 2019 was no exception. Think about this, 237 days in 2019 saw overnight lows of 50° or more. That is 2/3 of the year with toasty warm lows! 190 days in 2019 saw high temps at or above 60° which is more than half the year!

Looking forward into 2020 we are starting off mild with today's temp already tickling the 50° zone. Weather pros however are watching closely at things over Alaska. That notoriously cold state has been experiencing some of the coldest weather in a decade. The jet stream could make a correction and drag a bunch of that hyper frosty arctic air over the top of us and things can get wintry really fast. Happy New Year!     

The final stretch approaches along with first snow, sort of.

November is traditionally the wettest month of the year, but 2019 had other plans. I collected a measly 1.98 inches of rain in a month I usually see close to 8 inches. The last few years have been a bit dry so I wonder when that trend will reverse? November was a tad cooler overnight but a smidge warmer by day resulting in a slightly cooler than normal mean temp.

I mentioned in the title first snow and that is a bit of click bait. It did snow, but late in the evening just as midnight approached, flurries of snow began to fall. Only a tiny bit collected on the windshield of my car, barely enough to measure. The snow continued for an hour or so into this morning. By day break it was all gone.

Despite the rather mediocre weather last month did produce a few daily records. On the 5th and 7th lows of 31.1° and 32.7° were actually the chilliest I have recorded on those dates. On the morning of the 30th I recorded the coolest temp of the month, a genuinely crisp 20.8° but that fell well short of the daily record I posted back in 2015 of 16.1° and further off the all time November record for my station of 13.1°.

November also posted up a daily record high for my location when the mercury topped out at 62.8° on the 11th. The warmest mark of the month was the first day of  the month when the temp hit 63°. Overall I had nine mornings below freezing, nine days failing to reaching 50°, five days busting into the 60s, nine days with rain, 5 sunny days, and a lot of clouds.

Precipitation was light with the wettest day a mere 0.39 inches. Four days managed to produce a 1/4 inch or more. The last few days of the month presented a weather pattern that is the classic setup for heavy snow and the dreaded ice storm, had it been the end of December rather than November. The system that spit out the flurries came form the south. Northern California got a healthy dose of the pineapple express dumping copious amounts rain on the lowlands and huge volumes of snow in the mountains. Some of that warm wet air migrated north into our region and as the low pressure moved in the winds through the gorge brought in cold interior air. Deeper into winter that scenario can yield devastating weather like it did back in 2003-2004 when a foot and a half of snow fell from New Year's eve to the first week of January, followed by a solid INCH of ice in the biggest ice storm in a generation. But thankfully, November tends to be a bit warmer in the interior than December and January. This time the warmer air aloft mixed in with the cooler surface air and the result was just some flurries and a tiny bit of ice.

Looking ahead the models seem to indicated a warming trend with showers of rain and some highs in the 50s to start of the last month of 2019.