Oh the insanity. I just had to set one of my friends from Iowa straight. She said that she wanted Iowa to be more like Washington state. I nearly cried. Let me explain the weather in Washington. This may take a a while. You see there are actually three weather systems in Washington. You have the coast, the sound, and the east side.
The coast is just that, a strip of land along the Pacific ocean up to the Olympic Mountains. It has Pacific Northwest weather. This means it is cold, it rains, and it gets windy. There is a lot of sea spray and the beaches. The sun comes out and there are quite a few sunny days.
Then you move inland to the sound. This is where I live. The sound is the area between the Olympic Mountains and the Cascade Mountains. This are is just wide enough that it traps cloud cover. What I mean is that it is wide enough for clouds to form between the mountains, but the mountains are high enough to block any chance of a jet stream or higher winds from moving said clouds. So the weather here is weird as all get out. Forecasting the weather here requires a psychic, a priest, and a lot of luck. I took me 4 years of living here to put my finger on exactly why it sucked. It is so obvious that I did a self facepalm afterwards. It doesn't rain here all the time, but when it stops raining the clouds don't leave. Thus the sun doesn't shine between rainstorms and rainstorms could be weeks apart. The other thing the weather here does is hover. Temperatures around here hover at steps for months at a time then suddenly jump up or down for a day. In winter the temps hover in the high 20's to low 30's with random jumps up as much as 20 degrees and drops that are non existent. Thus, when it snows, it only lasts a day or two. This is the only place I have ever seen that it can snow and rain at the same time. There is nothing more disconcerting than seeing a raindrop obliterate a snowflake in mid air. To make things even more interesting, the temps will rise to the mid 50's around march and hover there until mid may. Through out this period, the temps will jump up to the mid 60's to high 70's for a couple of hours every once in a while, just to trick you into thinking that spring is here. Finally, around June, you get into the 70's about once a week and slowly build. Around August and into September, you finally get sun on a regular basis (if you can call once a week or so regular). Then in October the temperature plummet back down to the 40's and work their way lower for the next 2 months. Maybe around thanksgiving we will get a snowstorm, but usually it is just rain so cold that it sucks the heat out of everything. Oh, and there is no such thing as a serious rainstorm here. A big storm is usually 3 inches of rain over a 12 hour period with high winds (and I do mean high winds). The usual means the weather uses to deliver 5 inches of rain is a steady drizzle for a week. Like I said, the weather here hovers. It looks like it is going to rain everyday and rains once a week. Yeah, sound weather is depressing.
Then you get eastern Washington. This is the area between the Cascades and the Rockies. It is a high mountain plateau. Thus it is dry, sunny, and hot. This is the agricultural area and is sparsely populated. It is also the major portion of the state. I never really go there as I have to cross mountains to get there and that takes to long.
This being said, I have to wonder what makes people want to move to Seattle. It is right in the middle of the sound weather system. Yet, people move there all the time. If you want consistent weather and beautiful areas, you go to Hawaii. Now that I have explained my thoughts on this weather, maybe you can enlighten me with yours. Oh, and if you can ever figure out why someone would like this weather, don't tell me, I don't like being depressed.
No comments:
Post a Comment