Cliff Mass

I feel obligated to point to Cliff's blog, it's a great resource especially if you live in the northwest https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/

If you're a resident of the Pacific Northwest, Cliff Mass -- an atmospheric scientist at the University of Washington -- has an excellent regional climate and weather blog. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/

If you live in the Pacific Northwest, the blog of the professor mentioned in the article, Cliff Mass, is a must-read: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com

The forest part of PNW didn’t experience 120 degree weather. Additionally the event was highly atypical even with climate change and is estimated to be a 1 in 1000 years event due to various unlucky factors coming together. Climate change only contributed a few degrees to the peak temperatures in this recent PNW heatwave. More info about how this weather event came about and the misattribution to climate change from an atmospheric science professor who is the foremost expert on northwest climate: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-gre… https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/flawed-heatwave-report-leads-to…

If you have one hundred cities, then a "once in 100 yrs" event will happen in ~1 city per year. So first lesson is be careful assuming extreme events are necessarily linked directly to a trend. Cliff Mass' Weather Blog has been covering the heat since it was first predicted by the models a over a week ago [1]. His view [2] is that this would be a 100-year (or more!) event regardless of global warming. So the expert analysis is that this is not an indicator of climate change, but that warming is sure not helping. [1] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/the-greatest-heat-wave-in-north… [2] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/06/incredible-temperatures-are-bei…

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ Cliff Mass's blog has been providing good context about the meteorology of the heat dome.

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ Seattle local analysis by Prof. Cliff Mass of UW

I'd only say Mass is a skeptic of the shrillest, dumbest climate change predictions: the kind you get in the local alt-weekly, rather than the kind you get in actual scientific papers. Here's his most recent summary of his views, specifically how they apply locally: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/12/a-science-based-approach-to-dea…

This one is pretty good for Pacific Northwest http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ Another interesting specialist weather site to look at (not a community per se): https://www.windy.com/

Cliff Mass (whose blog is really worth following) points out that this is not an abnormal hurricane season by historical standards. There is not a big temperature anomaly in the waters fueling these storms: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/08/global-warming-and-hurricane-har… In other words, this is the kind of storm season you can expect to get once in a while even before factoring in the effect of warming seas.

> Last time they decided we needed more supercomputing power, and they got it. Did it help? Per a few sources I've seen, no, it didn't. One big cause of the GFS (USA) model's inaccuracy is lack the of computing power, which we've addressed a few times with new supercomputing clusters. The bigger problem is that the GFS model uses bad underlying physics. Decades ago we made several choices to optimize around the current architecture and processing ability, which was probably okay in the mid 1990s. Today, it just results in greatly inferior predictive ability compared to the European models. When you combine the poor model physics with lower resolution compared to the competitors, it becomes clear that we need to reboot the whole thing. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2016/06/us-numerical-weather-prediction…

Seasonal and regional, but whenever there is a hint of snow in western Washington state, I start reading posts by a UW meteorological professor: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com. He's acutely focused on the "perfect storm" of conditions needed for any significant amount of snow in our region.

Are you familiar with this blog? http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/ it's run by a UW meteorologist.

If you're interested in the science (and some of the problems we have in the US) read UW Professor Cliff Mass' blog - http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/

You missed the biggest player in numerical weather forecasting -- the European Center for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF). Everyone agrees their models are the world's best. Regrettably, the American models are pretty far behind: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2014/04/the-us-slips-to-fourth-place-in-… The ECMWF forecasts are indeed quite expensive, but all the major players in weather forecasting, including The Weather Channel and the National Weather Service, buy them.

for anyone unfamiliar with Cliff Mass, he's a meteorologist here in the Seattle area, and a professor at UW, who has pivoted almost [0] entirely to this sort of "soft" climate change denial. quite predictably, every time there's a major weather event in the news, he will chime in to give reasons why he thinks it shouldn't be blamed on climate change: > 2018: Northwest Wildfires: Are We Seeing a "New Normal" Due to Climate Change or The "Old Normal"? [1] > 2021: Is the Texas Cold Wave Caused By Global Warming? [2] > 2021: Was Global Warming The Cause of the Great Northwest Heatwave? Science Says No. [3] > 2022: Misinformation about Sea Level Rise [4] > 2025: Why the LA Wildfires Have Little to do With Long-Term Drought or Climate Change [5] > 2025: Seattle Times Climate Lab Misinforms about Climate Change, Sea-Level Rise, and Seattle Flooding [6] the overall takeaway across all his reporting seems to be that everyone but him is over-exaggerating the effects of climate change. and his "no connection to climate change" message often gets repeated beyond his blog, for example [7]: > Mass also emphasized that the floods had no connection to climate change. > “The climate change connection is non-existent. There is no trend in heavier precipitation in this region. There is no upward trend in floods,” he explained. 0: when he's not comparing the George Floyd protests in Seattle to Kristallnacht (https://www.thenewstribune.com/news/local/article244800747.html) 1:…

The county is Multnomah, which is where Portland is. So this type of activist lawsuit is no surprise. It’s amazing to me that officials are spending time and money on this ideological fight instead of focusing on the real problems that affect Portland citizens and businesses every single day such as drug abuse, encampments, property crime, physical assaults, and general blight. It’s also strange, or maybe purposeful, that the city does nothing about political violence in the city, particularly from groups like Rose City Antifa. The city used to be beautiful, safe, and was very attractive, but things have changed and they need to be fixed ASAP. Regarding the 2021 ‘heat dome’ event - there isn’t convincing science that attributes climate change for that one-off event. The subsequent few years have not had something similar. UW Atmospheric Science professor Cliff Mass wrote about this previously (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/07/was-global-warming-cause-of-gre… and demonstrated that it is most likely a rare event caused by a mix of overlapping factors and not causally linked to climate change. Other studies have claimed in their title or abstract that this event was caused by climate change, but when you read the actual paper, you’ll see them admit that they’re making a probabilistic guess and that it is also possible that it is just a rare event. Unfortunately journalists have recycled those headlines without any critical thought around it. All that said, I do…

Cliff Mass is a skilled meteorologist, and I owe my interest and knowledge of local Puget Sound weather to his excellent blog. However, readers ought to know that he has an unpleasant (and dangerous) habit of using his meterologically-derived platform to opine about issues that he has no knowledge about, such as the recent anti-racist protests [0]. These posts have led to two public radio stations in Seattle terminating his segments (KUOW and KNKX). He obviously has the right to these kinds of posts, but his skill in delivering these largely poorly-researched messages to a general public audience is incredibly amateurish, especially given the trust he's garnered as a scientist. As a scientist myself, I take particular issue with the way he presents topics regarding climate change. He makes very reasonable academic critiques about atmospheric models that are entirely un-interpretable by an untrained public (e.g. without the formal context required to understand that a scientist's job is to provide specific critique, and that those critiques don't always invalidate an entire research effort). These posts are picked up by climate deniers and suddenly "UW Scientist Says Climate Change is a Hoax!". Here's an example [1]. [0]: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/08/seattle-city-in-fear-can-be-res… [1]:https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2019/08/is-global-warming-existential-t…

A usual counterpoint to this is to organize people to do a pop-up street - the Better Block project evangelized this several years ago starting in Forth Worth TX http://betterblock.org https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ntwqVDzdqAU Also, it doesn't have to be for biking. Seattle has a parklets program where businesses can apply and fund to have parking spaces removed for additional sitting room: http://www.seattle.gov/transportation/permits-and-services/permits/par… Seattle (along with other cities like) does road diets to see if reducing lanes will change habits - I'm generally for this though it can sometimes get some criticism (e.g. Cliff Mass https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2017/04/fixing-seattles-traffic-mess.ht… ). Perhaps the method of informing & preparing commuters in advance of road diets could be improved, alongside making sure there's plans in place to ensure transit frustrations (e.g. crowded busses, bus bunching, last-mile problems) don't occur.

as a grad student in atmospheric science, I am a little skeptical of the applicability and robustness of these approaches. There are people in our group who apply machine learning ideas for prediction, and I use them for data analysis, so I am not against data-based approaches. however, the partial differential equations which govern the atmosphere are known, can be approximated in a computer, and have been done so for decades. It seems silly to pretend otherwise, and the best/current weather predictions use data and physics. This report make some pretty intense statements about the "limited success" of "analytical techniques", but in the end, they only claim to make an improvement of 1-2%. The kicker is that they make this comparison to the NOAA model, which is one of the crappiest models out there. The model the europeans use is about 5-10% more skillful, and it is generally recognized that the USA has fallen behind in this regard: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2012/03/us-fallen-behind-in-numerical-we…

At least a few of the people dead set against these methods are college professors seeing new students come in with no math skill whatsoever. See: http://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2010/01/how-good-are-uw-students-in-math… The 'classic' methods are algorithims. They work. They aren't any more complicated than the various other methods, but at least they work in all situations. The other methods, while they may be useful for fermi problems, don't always have a clear way to progress when the problems become harder. And the kicker is, they're no simpler when you account for all the 'non-easy' numbers. See: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tr1qee-bTZI Whatever the reason, there's a dramatic decline in the understanding of basic math by students at reasonably good universities over the last 20ish years. I've done the math, and I think I was on the tail end of a conservative swing. There's been one new math swing in that time, and I think we're heading back again. (This as the parent of small kids who's done way too much reading about the various curricula that are available, and how even the best ones used in classrooms pretty much suck. Jump and Singapore are the two that I know of that are pretty good, but they're not not USAian, so they don't get used in the schools. It is kinda funny going over problems in Jump and seeing the canadian cultural content.)

Doesn't seem like all climate scientists are fans of it either. From a 2022 critique of a news story also based on this map: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/04/is-large-portion-of-washington-… > The essential message is that weather and climate data do not support the claims of extreme or severe drought in eastern Washington this year. > There is no expectation of water problems over or near the Columbia Basin. The Drought Monitor graphics, which are created subjectively, are sufficiently problematic and deficient that they should not be considered or applied to any serious decision making.

There has long been a push among Republicans to privatize the National Weather Service. This will merely be a step in that direction. A few useful idiots like this guy (https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2025/04/the-seattle-times-claims-about.… are under the impression they'll come out ahead in the end, but I'm skeptical.

https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2023/08/smoke-and-tropical-storm-hilary… Heads up.

A local professor takes the local newspaper to task over this alarmism. https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2022/12/more-climate-misinformation-and…

Terrible loss of life, and the thought of these monster tornados striking at night is terrifying. Maybe it could have been worse though. Most of the warnings issued were accurate, from what I've read [0]. I really hope we continue to invest in these short-term weather forecasts. Clearly there have been recent advances, and we can still do better. [0] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tornado-warni…

> 2. Mayfield had over 2.5 hours of warning from KPAH.[0] I’ve noted elsewhere that this tweet wasn’t a formal warning, of course, but it was a strong heads-up that something big was in the offing. At the very least, local emergency managers should have been aware of this and monitoring the situation very closely. > [0] See https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tor... I think the author of that blog post made a time zone error. He is referencing this tweet in support of "2.5 hours warning": https://twitter.com/NWSPaducah/status/1469503102218760194 but Twitter tells me that tweet was sent at 9:03pm CT, not 7:03pm (Twitter would show him 7:03pm if he's on the west coast which I believe he is). So that would be more like 20-25 minutes warning (which is still impressive for a tornado), not 2.5 hours.

While that can still be true, lead times have gotten much better in general, and Mayfield actually had over 2.5 hours of warning from KPAH[0], which is remarkable. But 45 mins or more seems to be the norm these days, at least in my general observations. Local authorities choosing to sound the alarms as soon as the warnings are issued is perhaps another matter. Edit: Someone else commented elsewhere that the current average lead time on TOR warnings is 9 minutes, so I stand corrected. Some of this probably depends on the storm mode associated with the tornado. For a supercell, the radar signatures are pretty clear and distinct, so it’s easier to provide earlier warnings. A tornado embedded in a QLCS is more difficult to detect, so I’d expect advanced notification to be more difficult. [0] See, e.g., https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2021/12/a-critical-gap-in-tornado-warni…

He posted updates yesterday and today explaining why the models were wrong, it’s a very interesting insight into some of the complexities of the problem and how many variables are involved: https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/09/much-more-pessimistic-air-quali… https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/09/why-smoke-situation-isnt-improv… Basically, no good news till at least tomorrow: >> So I am not optimistic for improvement either today or Wednesday. With smoke production (at a lower level) by the continuing fires, a "stuck" weather pattern, and smoke trapped in a relatively stable lower atmosphere, things just can't improve rapidly.

Cliff Mass spoiled himself for me with this asinine blog post comparing Seattle BLM protesters to brownshirts in Nazi Germany [0]. It feels icky to get behind someone who will use his platform to sling ridiculous accusations and accept no criticism [1]. It's a shame - his weather reporting is uniquely good and fun to read. [0] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/08/seattle-city-in-fear-can-be-res… [1] https://cliffmass.blogspot.com/2020/08/my-firing-at-knkx.html EDIT: Fleshed out criticism of the original blog post: http://www.dailyuw.com/news/article_8421ecd2-d90c-11ea-9e91-3f2d966a45…