Vancouver Weather Blog

Cold and wet.  Portland experienced the coolest, wettest April on record. Check out the mean temperature at my weather station in comparison to 2010.  3.3 degrees might not seem like much, but that is over 30 days!  Need I say anything more?   Here’s the stats for April:

Values in parenthesis  are from 2010 for comparison.

High Temperature: 70.1 4/23  (73.3 in 2010)

Low Temperature:  30.6 4/8  (33.4 in 2010)

Mean Temperature:  46.3  (49.6 in 2010)

Rain:  3.40″  (2.71″ in 2010)

Wind Speed High:  25 mph  4/13 (40 mph in 2010)

Wind Speed Average:  2.0 mph  (3.0 mph in 2010)

Wind Speed Dominant Direction:  S  (S in 2010)

I just read this from UW meteorologist Cliff Mass about our spring weather:

Portland has had its fifth wettest winter on record and the LATEST on record in getting to 60F. That is really the central problem: as long as we get a few warm spring days it is tolerable…this year they have been few warm intervals.

If you are feeling like it isn’t spring yet I think I can see why.

What a wet month!  In March I recorded only 5 days without precipitation which is really amazing.   Normally March is a transition month where there a lots of showers but not consistent days of rain.  Not this year though!

The days it did rain it didn’t rain a great deal.  The most I recorded on a single day was .47″ of rain on 3/10.  Again not a spectacular single day amount but the compilation of 26 days of rain sure added up.  This did end up being my wettest March in 12 years of record keeping by beating out March 2003 by .37″.

Here’s the statistics for the month:

Values in parenthesis  are from 2010 for comparison.

High Temperature:  62.7 3/31  (69.9in 2010)

Low Temperature:  30.2 3/7  (29.5 in 2010)

Mean Temperature:  45.0  (47.2 in 2010)

Rain:  5.24″  (3.07″ in 2010)

Wind Speed High:  38 mph  2/14 (40 mph in 2010)

Wind Speed Average:  3 mph  (3.0 mph in 2010)

Wind Speed Dominant Direction:  S  (3 in 2010)

The first half of February was pretty benign with little interesting weather activity occurring.  Then around the middle of the month winter returned with snowfall occurring at my weather station on 2/16 and 2/24.  The snow on the 16th came after a high of 63 the day before!  At time this snow was impressive with 2″ diameter flakes falling.  They hardly seemed real they were so large.  On the 24th it snowed overnight and I awoke to everything being coated with snow.  Everything looked beautiful!  Next came the cold with a 16 degree temperature record on 2/26.  Two days later though temperature were back to near normal and we received over an inch of rain in 24 hours.   Wow, what a roller coaster!

Here’s the statistics for the month:

Values in parenthesis  are from 2010 for comparison.

High Temperature:  63.0 2/15  (58.6 in 2010)

Low Temperature:  16.0 2/26  (27.8 in 2010)

Mean Temperature:  49.0  (46.4 in 2010)

Rain:  3.29″  (3.04″ in 2010)

Wind Speed High:  37 mph  2/14 (33 mph in 2010)

Wind Speed Average:  1 mph  (2.0 mph in 2010)

Wind Speed Dominant Direction:  S  (E in 2010)

December was a pretty typical winter month here in the Northwest.  It had a mix of rain (heavy at times) and cold.  Right what it should be!  There was more rain this year than last but it wasn’t abnormally high.

Here’s the statistics for the month:

Values in parenthesis  are from 2009 for comparison.

High Temperature:  58.3 12/1  (51.2 in 2009)

Low Temperature:  22.0 12/31  (11.4 in 2009)

Mean Temperature:  42.0  (35.0 in 2009)

Rain:  6.86″  (3.99″ in 2009)

Wind Speed High:  43 mph  12/17 (38 mph in 2009)

Wind Speed Average:  3 mph  (1.7 mph in 2009)

Wind Speed Dominant Direction:  E  (E in 2009)

November was quite the month with lots of rain, a dusting of snow and some frigid temperatures.  Like most Novembers it had its usual elements of rain and wind which are both quite typical.  In the end November was certainly a good start to winter here in the Northwest.

Here’s the statistics for the month:

Values in parenthesis  are from 2009 for comparison.

High Temperature:  70.2  11/3  (61.1 in 2009)

Low Temperature:  14.1 11/24  (33.1 in 2009)

Mean Temperature:  44.0  (45.6 in 2009)

Rain:  5.55″  (4.78″ in 2009)

Wind Speed High:  29 mph  11/3 (41 mph in 2009)

Wind Speed Average:  2 mph  (2.2 mph in 2009)

Wind Speed Dominant Direction:  S  (S in 2009)

For years I provided detailed data captured every 30 minutes from the weather station on the website.  When I upgraded software last spring I debated the value of that and chose to remove it due to the fact it would provided little information to anyone.  At that time I did not replace it with anything instead just left the NOAA format reports under the Climatological Data tab on the menu. 

I’ve not been happy with my lack of data access so I decided to come to a compromise between the large amounts of data previously present and the hard to use data in the NOAA reports.  What I’ve done is build a spreadsheet which contains all of the data from all of the NOAA reports consolidated into one spreadsheet.  Inside the spreadsheet are two tabs Monthly Summary and Annual summary.   The monthly summary tab has summary data for each month of each year while the Annual summary has a single line for each year.  Yes, the annual summary could be derived from the monthly summary but I since the data is easy to get I chose to just include both for ease of use.

During the assembly of this data I realized that prior to 2002 I have some barometric pressure and humidity data missing.  Please don’t be alarmed if you see some blanks in those columns as you look through the data.

This new spreadsheet should provide some better data access which will help answer some questions people regularly have about weather in Vancouver.  Click on Climatological Data | 1999 – Present (zip) to see for yourself!