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.

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!!

(Update: Did I call it? ;) Wind Warning now issued for all of Vancouver Island and Lower Mainland… look for the barometer to head towards 97kpa. The closer it gets, the stronger shot we will receive. Up to 80kph)

You might have noticed the barometer value up top is in the yellow. That generally means one thing. Wind!

The GFS model is saying we’ll get down to 98kpa tonight. We’re certainly on our way.

We should get some moderate rain tonight before the wind comes. Just 20-25 in the forecast so shouldn’t be a risk of flooding. We’re looking at about half the amount this storm than we did the past two.

The GFS windogram says we’re in for only 15knot winds. This is actually the first time I’ve used the windogram for our area, so we’ll see how accurate it is. I have a feeling it underestimates greatly as EC generally does as well.

And some of you might like to know. We got a visit on Friday from Dr. Andrew Weaver, 2007 Nobel Peace Prize winner for 2007 with the IPCC. He was here to take some pictures of our weather station as it is part of his islandweather.ca network and to install new stations on Alberni Elementary and Maquinna Elementary. My wife met him, without realizing his fame :) I was not home from work yet. Bummer!

Anyway, stay safe out there! And hey, end of January/beginning of February is still looking cool, possibility of snow in time for the Olympics? (Imagine a giant dump of snow on Vancouver on February 13! OMG hahah)

UPDATE: Flood Watch Ended for Port Alberni thanks to cooler temps/snow in mountains—But Flood Warning for Cowichan Valley issued (details here)

As Jeff Masters at WUnderground and many other weather bloggers have said… this year hasn’t been your typical El Nino year in North America. Why? Because we had an exceptionally negative Arctic Oscillation and North Atlantic Oscillation that kinked the jetstream all crazy like and allowed waves of very cold Arctic air to flow down into North America and Europe (and very warm air to flow into Alaska and Greenland).

Well… that weather pattern is breaking down now… and it looks like the jetstream will move south into a more El Nino like pattern and flow across the continent, bringing more storms to California rather than us and warmth to the Eastern US.

Before that happens though, we need to get through this weekend. We’re expecting over 100mm over the next couple days, and then probably another shot over 50mm on Sunday/Monday.

Once we hit late next week, the temperatures should cool off a bit and while we won’t be getting any large dumps of snow, it should at least calm the nerves of VANOC as the snow comes back to the local mountains.

Oh and, and speaking of the Olympics. Apparently there is a new data gathering service being set up by the NOAA flying out of Japan to coincide with the Olympics in Vancouver . Their goal is to gather weather data from the West and Central North Pacific waters where data is sparse right now.

The Pacific is literally where most of the weather comes from for North America, so this data will be fed directly into computer models and should make them more accurate in their long term forecasts not just for us, but all of North America.