Heat wave in the Pacific Northwest

Been seeing reports of triple digit temperatures during the heat wave in the Pacific Northwest lately, including daily breaking of record highs (116F in Portland yesterday!). Hope you WBers and winemakers up there are holding up ok.

yesterday was brutal, today is much, much nicer

We got central air a couple of years ago. Great investment. You won’t hear too many people saying we don’t need A/C in Seattle any longer.

I lived in Bakersfield from 1978 to 1991. We had “swamp coolers” when I got there. Basically trading cool humidity for dry heat. It really sucked when the temp got above about 95 or so. Of course it only did that for three or four months or so…

At least two heat related deaths reported.

We have never had any kind of air conditioning in 45 years of home ownership in Seattle, and there are usually only a handful of days each year when it is needed. Many years, none needed at all. When we moved to Seattle, it had hit 100 degrees once, in 1941. Next time was 1994. The last three days went over 100.
The Seattle times published a chart of record temperatures for each day in June, and the year it occurred. since 1945)
1 record in the 1950s
3 records in the 1960s
2 records in the 1970s
5 records in the 1980s
5 records in the 1990s
5 records in the 2000s
6 records in the 2010s
3 three records already for this year, and 8 total records in the last five years.

I think I see a trend.

Interesting math going on there, that pattern would be observed with a stable average temperature and a stable standard deviation. The further you are away from 1950 the higher the probability of a larger SD event, thus the highest temps are always further from the starting point. This is not the way to see a trend, outliers are just that, outliers, and they are more sensitive to changes in variance than in average.

Yeah, I was in Southlake yesterday at 5:00, walked outside and talked to a women who grew up in Arizona, she said this felt like where she grew up. No A/C in my apartment so we used a lot of wet towels on the neck…

It was definitely above 9 degrees F the past few days!:grinning:

I vote with Jim. Double-digit temperatures would be somewhere between 10 and 99. Triple-digit would be 100 or above. Here in Portland, we were around 113. Ouch.
Phil Jones

Think through the math again.

6 extreme events in a 35 year period from 1945 to 1980
8 extreme events in a five year period from 2016 to 2021

It has nothing at all to do with extreme events accumulating at a distance from a set point. Should you see the same if 2020 was the starting point and you were looking in both directions?

A stock market low in 1950 is not the same as a stock market low in 2020, because the trend line it going up.

I’ve been noticing for many years that the high temperature records for Seattle are mostly recent, and the low temperature records are mostly. In stable conditions, roughly the same number of high and low records should be set for any ongoing time period.

Take it for what it’s worth, but the head climate guy from UW said last weekend was an anamoly and had nothing to do with climate change. Before you all get all upset,
just repeating what he said.He was only talking about this particular event not the overall state of the climate.

Brian, everything you wrote about statistics is complete nonsense and mathematically incorrect.

The further you are away from 1950, the higher probability of an outlier event occurring sometime between 1950 and the later date. There’s no reason why any outlier event would show a greater deviation in the 1990s than in the 1970s assuming the average temperature and variation were consistent.

In fact, since the records are only kept from 1945, the number of records every year should go down as time goes on because a record on May 1st 1960 is only compared to the 15 years before while May 1st 2021 is compared to the sample of 86 years before. In other words if temperature and variability were stable over that time, the number of “record” days on average would go down every decade.

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Fixed the original post :joy:

It was stupid hot, with an even hotter wind. When stepping outside it felt like opening an oven, and then the wind would blow and it was even worse. Luckily grape vines tend to shut down above about 90 degrees.

The cooling SW wind came in quick Monday evening. The temp on my back deck that faces west and is in the sun as it sets (just south of Dundee) at 5pm was 112. By 5:30 it was 108. 6:30 was 103, 7:30 was 97, by about 11 is was 74. Almost a 40 degree drop in 4 hours.

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Just wondering what stage the grapes were at, generally, during this heat spike?? Thanks

I’m out looking at vineyards today and, yes, this is a small sample size still at this point. Also, I would say that folks here like Marcus, Kevin H., Wes, etc. have more scientific/biology smarts and knowledge about vineyards than do I so I’m not saying I can back up what I’m seeing and will say about it with any actual data or facts. This will likely annoy some of the folks from the terroir thread but so it goes.

I was out in vineyards last Thursday and Friday before Heat Dome really kicked in. There is no friggin’ way the plants shut down during the heat spike. We were slightly past flowering stage late last week. Lots of places still had flower husks on the berries and some still had flowers that hadn’t dropped yet. That was on Friday the 25th. We are largely now at a pre-bunch close stage in many/most places. I would estimate a cluster size gain of at least 50% or more in around 100 hours. That doesn’t happen if the plants aren’t at work.

Maybe the plants responded with some emergency level shit and pushed energy and water into the clusters as a defense mechanism against dehydration and sunburn. Maybe vines live in a non-linear time space and experienced the heat event prior to it happening. Maybe plants from the future came and moved into this timeline. Who knows? Any explanation is fine with me. I’ve now seen three decent sized vineyards spanning multiple varieties and clones and other than some hen and chick stuff there would be no way to know that we just experienced the 3 hottest days in the history of Oregon back to back to back. Maybe there will be a price to pay for this later on down the line. I don’t know and am not claiming to know what exactly is happening now let alone what might happen 2 weeks from now. In 2017 we went from 6-10 inch shoots in the middle of June to bunch close at the end of July and I couldn’t explain that either. These are living entities that we think and pretend we understand but are really only scratching the surface of in any real way.

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Yeah, it reminded me of summers in Chico when I was in college. Of course that was a long time ago and I could take the heat better then. I think the previous all time high in Portland was 108 or something like that. The old Portland joke about the sun not coming out until July 5 doesn’t seem applicable any more…

Probably time to start the annual fire and smoke taint thread…

All things considered this was not a bad time for the heat stress. Fruit set has already occurred and the berries are small and green. The vines tend to shut down photosynthesis and basically go into survival mode so this can delay berry development (although Jim’s observations showed continued berry development). Luckily this was only a three day event and therefore at worst, would only delay harvest just a tad.

I’m guessing that the worse effects would be for vineyards that have new plantings (a new vineyard, an expansion and/or the random replacements in an established vineyard due to disease or other factors)? I haven’t checked any yet…

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No, let’s think positive thoughts and hope for the best for the 2021 vintage. champagne.gif

Hundreds dead due to heat wave in BC an PNW – pretty shocking numbers:

Lisa Lapointe, British Columbia’s chief coroner, said 486 deaths had been reported there between Friday and Wednesday afternoon — a period in which about 165 deaths would normally be documented. Deaths were expected to increase, she said.

“While it is too early to say with certainty how many of these deaths are heat related, it is believed likely that the significant increase in deaths reported is attributable to the extreme weather B.C. has experienced,” she said.

Oregon’s state medical examiner’s office on Wednesday attributed at least 63 deaths in five days to the punishing heat in that state, including 45 in Multnomah County, which includes Portland — where temperatures have reached a record 116 degrees Fahrenheit.