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!