Charlie Phillips

“Unprecedented” is an overused meteorological buzzword, but in the case of the June 2021 Pacific Northwest Heatwave, it is absolutely warranted. This heatwave shattered meteorologist’s preconceptions of what the u […]

It was hot Sunday and today! My brother came down to Portland for the weekend, and yesterday, we went cliff diving at High Rocks Park on the Clackamas River. There were some pretty acrobatic divers jumping off the […]

11:00 pm Monday

What a shift in weather we’ve seen over the last week! In my last blog on 5/31, I was talking about the potential for record heat in Portland on Tuesday, 6/1. Portland indeed set a record that […]

It was toasty this Memorial Day weekend! Portland hit 82 on Saturday, 84 on Sunday, and 88 today, According to chief KPTV meteorologist Mark Nelsen, this was the warmest Memorial Day weekend by average high […]

The warmest temperatures of the year are on tap for this weekend into early next week, and we’ll have super low tides to go along with the hot weather. This post ended up being kinda (dare I say, unnecessarily?) […]

Last Wednesday, the United States Bureau of Reclamation (USBR), a government agency that oversees water resource management in the Western US and Great Plains, announced that they would close the main irrigational […]

What happens when you combine an unstable airmass, a mountain range, and daytime heating? You get scattered afternoon/evening thunderstorms that bubble up along the Cascade crest! We saw a ton of those today and […]

Remember the “Blob?” That awful patch of sterile, warm water from late 2013-2015 and again in summer 2019? Well, now we have the opposite of the “Blob;” a swath of cooler-than-average water along the West Coast […]

April 2021 was by far the driest April on record for Portland, with only 0.39″ of rain falling at Portland Int’l Airport. This record-dry April occurred on the heels of a much drier-than-average March. As I […]

Many locations across the Pacific NW have seen their driest start to spring on record. As of April 22, Portland has seen a paltry 1.64 inches of rain since March 1, which is more than 4 inches below-average. […]

La Nina years are known for bringing hefty snows to the Cascades. I still remember the La Nina year of 2007-2008, when I went skiing in the Alpental backcountry on Memorial Day with my mom. We had to skirt around […]

When somebody asks me the forecast and I want to give them a (good-spirited) sarcastic response, I’ll usually give them a forecast of “showers and sunbreaks.” I’ll say something like “we’ll see various types of […]

What beautiful weather we’ve had this week! I’ve been outside in shorts & a t-shirt the past few days, and let me tell ya – 60 degrees has never felt so warm before! The snowstorms of mid-February seem like a […]

It now appears likely that Western Washington and NW Oregon will experience a series of significant winter storms from midday Thursday through Saturday evening, bringing snow, sleet, freezing rain, extremely […]

I’m not a big beer drinker. However, I always have a few cans of Coors in my fridge in case some friends come over and want to crack a cold one. Why Coors? Because the mountains turn blue when it’s “as cold as the […]

There are many well-known portmanteaus of snow and catastrophic descriptors, with Snowzilla, Snowmageddon, and Snowpocalypse being some of the primary offenders. But what about a more pedestrian snowfall that […]

It’s been said that “snow is the most difficult thing to forecast in the Pacific Northwest.” And while I believe this is often true – our terrain, microclimates, and often marginal temperatures can make snow […]

It’s been a while since we had a significant, regionwide, winter windstorm hit the Pacific NW. The last major windstorm to hit the Inland Northwest was the 11/17/2015 windstorm, which brought an extended period of […]