So you might have noticed in the forecast for next week there is mention of the whitestuff!

Mark Madryga was mentioning it on his forecast Thursday morning as well and he seemed quite adamant that “higher elevations” could receive a bit of snow on Monday.

What do you think? Are we in for a big dump! Is this going to be our Snowmageaddon? Are we going to give up our record warm January and February and have a Decembery-March?

Can this winter get any more abnormal?

The final weekend of the Olympic games likely won’t be as wet as the first weekend. (It was wet I know!) But it will still be wet. For the next week we have a pretty respectable 110mm of rain in the forecast.

Doesn’t look like any major events will hit us. Just some days or evenings of good steady rain.

I did also want to mention a report that was released a few days ago. For the past few years, a common refrain from some corners of the climate community has been that there could be more or stronger hurricanes in a warmed world. Scientists acknowledged a possibility, but there was no hard evidence, or at least any hard research to back that up.

Well, now there is, and the verdict is a bit of both.

The research is published here, in Nature Geoscience, and it says:

it remains uncertain whether past changes in tropical cyclone activity have exceeded the variability expected from natural causes. However, future projections based on theory and high-resolution dynamical models consistently indicate that greenhouse warming will cause the globally averaged intensity of tropical cyclones to shift towards stronger storms, with intensity increases of 2–11% by 2100. Existing modelling studies also consistently project decreases in the globally averaged frequency of tropical cyclones, by 6–34%. Balanced against this, higher resolution modelling studies typically project substantial increases in the frequency of the most intense cyclones, and increases of the order of 20% in the precipitation rate within 100 km of the storm centre.

Now of course we don’t get tropical storms here directly. But we do certainly have periods, especially in the October/November/December timeframe when former tropical storms “curl” back towards us from Japan and the West Pacific and give a little extra punch to our storms.

2% isnt much in terms of wind … but a 20% increase in precipitation certainly would not be very welcome down on 3rd ave.

The Spring Olympics continue!

Actually now that the rain has cleared up, the weather is a lot better for the skiers than last weekend. We can expect more cold foggy mornings here and bright, sunny and warm afternoons.

There isn’t a whole lot going on in the forecast. Just a nice stretch of warm weather. It should last through until Monday. After that, we will go back to rainy days.

Hope you’re all enjoying the Olympics! We had an amazing time in Vancouver. The ceremonies were beautiful and amazing and the 18-0 hockey game was a blast!

Go Canada Go!

No snow for here, but maybe some snow for where it counts for those poor skiers plying their trade on hay bales and fake stuff.

Todays rain will be steady, but not overly drenching. It is also at least a little on the cool side, so hopefully that means snow for the mountains and no worry about flooding or anything like that.

The worst of the rain will come on Saturday night and it will warm up a bit as well for Saturday so it is likely to rain fairly high up as well.

Either way, it’s a pretty typical winter welcome for the Olympics. Lets face it, this is Vancouver after all, did we really expect it to snow?

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Rockies, the world is basically coming to an end. It’s snowing in Dallas, and the reallyreally* White House is buried under >120 centimeters of snow. That’s over 4 feet!

P.S. You will have noticed the change in style on the webpage. Not a huge change, but I think it’s cool. I’ve been honing my web coding skills and learning some new stuff.

Also, for any Internet Explorer users, I realised the menus on the side haven’t been working properly for you for quite a while. My apologies. You should now be able to use those menus a little more easily.

And finally. If you click on the Alberniweather Webcam image inside the current conditions, you will now come to a “live” feed of the webcam rather just a large static image. The image now updates automatically every 5 seconds or so.

And don’t forget about the Video Timelapses on Youtube and Wunderground. I uploaded a full year timelapse of 2009 a few weeks ago. You can see it at http://www.youtube.com/alberniweather

Come on, admit it. You’re secretly wishing for it aren’t you ;)
Welcome to Vancouver, Need an Umbrella? :D

UPDATE: This is getting a little more serious now. As of this morning (Monday) the GFS has increased its estimate up to 210mm Thursday through Sunday. With the largest amounts coming Friday night and Sunday morning. The probability of strong winds has also increased particularly for all of Saturday but also on Thursday night . Saturday is still 6 days away, so this forecast could still change but at this point it is pretty ugly.

On the bright side, the temperatures aren’t forecast to be above 8 degrees. So maybe, juuuuuust maybe, Cypress Bowl will get a big dump of snow right in time for the Olympics.

Or maybe they’ll still have to snowboard on the straw bales and 2 month old snow, while it pukes down sleet.

Oh I don’t envy those athletes nor the organizers one bit. They’re really not getting much of a break!

We’ll see how it pans out.

Full Disclosure: My wife, daughter and I will be at the Opening Ceremonies on Friday (nosebleeds! 5 from the top of BC Place!) and Canada vs. Slovakia womens hockey on Saturday. We’re extremely excited and I really hope the weather is OK. We’re also very thankful to my friends in Vancouver who have put us up (or are putting up with us? :) ) for 3 nights! Thanks Rod and Roz, you’re the best!!