here are my weather sites, a combination of [1] the navy military site; and [2] the SF based jet stream + forecast I am batting .750 as compared to the Seattle Times .500, and I am being generous. # 3 probast of the U. of W. is pretty good too.

1]

http://www.nrlmry.navy.mil/sat_products.html

2]

http://squall.sfsu.edu/crws/jetstream.html
3]
http://www.probcast.com/

http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/sew/

http://www.noaa.gov/
4]

http://www.elnino.noaa.gov/forecast.html
5]
www.pdc.org
6]
http://www.theweatherprediction.com/
7]

http://asp.usatoday.com/weather/CityForecast.aspx?txtSearchCriteria=Washington≻=N
8]
http://www.spaceweather.com/
9]

http://wwwa.accuweather.com/index-radar.asp?partner=&zipcode=
10]

http://iwin.nws.noaa.gov/iwin/wa/state.html
11]

http://uk.weather.com/maps/intleurope.html

12]
http://ww2010.atmos.uiuc.edu/(Gh)/wwhlpr/pressure_units.rxml
13]

http://www.americanscientist.org/template/AssetDetail/assetid/51963?fulltext=true&print;=yes

14]

http://sciencenow.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/2006/714/2?etoc

I haven't read Mr. Mass's book, but I am guessing it doesn't address global warming much. When it comes to weather, isn't it odd to not discuss such an important influence?

I remember the storm well..a very heavy shower associated with great atmospheric instability. This is not uncommon...the classic Seattle showers and sunbreaks. When a front moves by cold air often moves in aloft. As the surface heats during the day a large change of temperature with height develops, and the atmosphere goes unstable...it is just like your bubbling hot cereal. But in this case there are clouds and showers instead of up-bubbling oatmeal.

It is true that many people misinterpret probability of precipitation and Susan Joslyn and her group is try to get to the bottom of it and design new forecast icons that make it more intuitive. Really fascinating stuff...it turns out that explicitly showing people the chances it WON'T rain helps a great deal.

This is a problem that won't go away. Meteorologists really should be giving probabilities for every weather parameter...not just precipitation...because there are always uncertainties in the forecasts. Sometimes meteorologists are more certain than other times...we need to be able to communicate that!

And let me say, I really appreciate Pugetopolis....although I think there should be more about weather wimps...and a whole section on our Mayor and the salt follies in the next edition.

PS: to answer EJS...there is a whole chapter in my book on global warming and its potential effects here in the NW. This is one of my most active areas of research.

I've always chuckled at the "20% chance of rain" statistics. Even the true meaning isn't that helpful. Coming from Florida orginally with frequent, highly localized thunderstorms it's even less precise to say that 20% of the time with these climate conditions it will rain because it necessarily neglects any geographic distinctions.

That's why I like to think of it more as "it will rain 20% of the time on 20% of the people watching this broadcast over 20% of King 5's coverage area."

And, though you would never know it, our sun remains very quiet :
quite like preceding the Dalton Minimum or, perhaps ( you really don't want this to happen ) a Maunder Minimum.

Let see, where is the chapter in the book that talks about what happens
when the climate cools ( as it is doing now ) ?, sorry, no offense to the AGW crowd. They are still drinking their dry ice cooled Kool Aid !

The sun and our oceans ( mainly the Pacific ) drive our weather - but we
are not supposed to question how, OR what they are doing now .

If I had to guess you all will be at Kane Hall, Room 130 tomorrow, basking in the glow of Archers piece of fiction ?

Here’s Prof. Freeman Dyson on the climate models:

“I have studied the climate models and I know what they can do. The models solve the equations of fluid dynamics, and they do a very good job of describing the fluid motions of the atmosphere and the oceans. They do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry and the biology of fields and farms and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in. The real world is muddy and messy and full of things that we do not yet understand. It is much easier for a scientist to sit in an air-conditioned building and run computer models, than to put on winter clothes and measure what is really happening outside in the swamps and the clouds. That is why the climate model experts end up believing their own models.”

also Antonio Zichichi, who has said this :

“…models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are incoherent and invalid from a scientific point of view”

Who is Antonio Zichichi? President of the World Federation of Scientists, President of the Enrico Fermi Centre, discovery of Nuclear Antimatter.

i don't know, with all this "weather" hereabouts folks ought to write about it more interestingly than Mossback does. Here's one of a series of mine on the topic, from my forthcoming "Steeped in Seattle [better than in Old Tea Bag anyhow]"

"Weather Poem # 2

Puget Sound regarded as a large sink
and Seattle as the drainage pit..

As a sink with the wide slide open to all sides of the North Pacific...
like a hungry harvester open, svivable, openable to all sides, voracious for rain it seems
a dowsing rod…

as that for dirty dishes at the dish-wash duty...
dishes marching in regular formations on the conveyer belt...
the storms and their counter-clockwise swirl that seem to drive march in chiefly from the southwest while an overall west to east prevails

the wildly gyrating jet stream of the "Northsoutheastwest" sire...
that sires oh how that sire sires..
accompanied by the ever more terrified apprehensions of the soaked washers…
#
it takes feet of cedar bark to protect...the cedar from the dank
and the inuit, who wraps himself…
#

small storms and large storms, rich in moisture at all times of the year,
rich in the dank from the forever cold, clammy north pacific, the last area to warm up during global warming,
mean temperature in the forties, 41 on December 1st, 48 on July 1st,
about a fourth of the globe like that... even El Niño can’t do much about that,
now and then the surface warms a bit, but the deep-welling dank cold persists and always wins at all times of the year... the confluence of cold currents into the pacific…

Consider the jet stream a conveyer belt
that moves more or less rapidamente,
if occasionally frayed, gets stuck, gets frayed, but near invariably hits the spot... the wide open sink... and then pours from all sides but chiefly... into the drain... for six months, sometimes nine months at a time...

Trickling gliding droplets down into the drain
everything appears to have cleared out, but there
is always one drop left, somewhere, to hit the spot in the drain, sliding in, one last fat drop

pumping, dragging, cooling, tempering the offerings from the tropics...
everything looks peaceful, navy blue on the navy site,
but if there isn't that one drop, that vapor veil, that mist, that low-lying set of clouds, that haze that materializes, coagulates into drops that slide down the sink sides and form drops or mere condensing mist...

as each class of storms...
narrows...
to something of a point...
a slide with all kinds of drops ...
[c] michael roloff

Knute wrote:

Cliff, what do you call this stuff? Snow-rain mix didn't seem to do it justice. Sleet? Frozen rain? Proof of an angry God?

I nominate: Rice Flurries. When it hits your windshield it looks a lot like bits of rice pudding, if you were driving down a street where someone was tossing rice pudding.

PS To Cliffmass: I am happy to read this!