Welcome to December! Most of you probably don’t want to relive
this past month, but who doesn’t love stats? 😉
First let’s dig up some old news and look at my November
prediction made back in September. The bold areas are the parts of
the forecast I got right:
November will be our transition month. We’ll notice
temperatures getting colder with many “first frosts” popping up
around the peninsula. The most notable thing about
November will be all the rain. Usually November is a wet month, but
this year it’s projected to be quite wet. Temperatures will hover
around normal for the month, but enough warmer, Pineapple
Express-type rain storms could nudge the temperature up a tad. The
jet stream will not have responded to the El Nino atmosphere quite
yet, so expect a lot of cloudy, rainy days. The snow
chance is up to 40%, meaning most of the month it will
likely be too mild for snow, but we could have a few bouts
of it towards the end of the month
So not TOO bad. We had many first frosts between November
9th-11th, which then gave way to a lot of rain storms, a few of
them being Pineapple Express-type storms. Definitely the most
notable thing about this month was all the rain. How much rain, you
ask? Oh, not much. Just 15.45” worth!
Ahem…5” above normal. Wow! Just slightly wetter than
normal 😉
It was also a mild month in many ways. Let’s take a look at
our trusty graph:
Just look at that dive in low temperatures! On November 10th
we went head first into a 23 degree low temperature reading, which
was certainly not called for. Several more freezes occurred after
that before things started to warm back up. How mild did we
get?
The average November temperature around here is 41.05 degrees.
Our actual November temperature came out at a dead even 43 degrees,
which was almost exactly 2 degrees above normal.
It seems mild/wet November’s have been the norm for a long
time now. Kind of like our Indian Summer’s. Other than the
excessive rain/flooding and bouts with dry, cold air, November was
a fairly typical month. It is worth noting, however, that several
ski resorts opened up before Thanksgiving, a goal which can’t
always be met!
And yes, it still looks like a continued wet pattern is in
store for December. If it’s any consolation, we shouldn’t be seeing
November’s constantly rainy pattern extending into this new month
🙂
Have a great weekend, everyone!!
Matthew Leach
Forecasting Kitsap
E-mail: forecastingkitsap@live.com
