Western Oregon and Washington Post Warmest Winter

The winter of 2014-15 was the warmest winter on record in western Washington and Oregon. (Climatologists define winter as the months of December through February.) Each winter month was warmer than average at almost every Oregon recording station. Hundreds of high-temperature records were broken, with only a few dozen low-temperature records set. In some places…

New Survey Tools Cast Doubt on Old Assumptions

Here in the Northwest, researchers and forest managers are hoping to understand what it will take to make our region’s forests more resilient in the face of climate change and disturbances from pests, including the notorious mountain pine beetle. Two recent studies attempt to better define and quantify what this resilience might look like. The…

Smaller Trees, Less Biomass Found in California Forests

California’s forests are becoming denser and packed with smaller trees as the climate warms. That’s the conclusion of a recent study led by Patrick McIntyre of the California Department of Fish and Wildlife. The study, published in the journal of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, found that while the overall number of trees…

Snowpack To Decline Sharply in Oregon, Washington

As this year’s dismal snow season grinds to an unceremonious halt, Oregon and Washington’s Cascade Mountains are registering virtually no snow. Now an analysis from the University of Idaho suggests the Cascades’ low-snow conditions will become common under climate change. The analysis — performed by Abigail Lute, CIRC’s John Abatzoglou, and Katherine Hegewisch — estimates…

Wetter, Wilder Winters in Store for West Coast

More and stronger winter deluges will pummel the West Coast as the climate warms, projections show. Researchers at the University of Washington looked into the size and frequency of future “atmospheric rivers” — those long, narrow swaths of moist air loaded with tropical or subtropical vapor that trigger many of the biggest flooding events on…

Seeking a Climate-Change Signal in Wind Waves

Regional trends in wave height are driven by local winds and traveling swells. In the North Pacific, wind-driven waves dominate. But the record of wave observations is too short to tell us much about the role of climate change in wave-size trends. That’s why a German and Danish team of researchers approached the question a…