Beyond Moderately Cold

OK, so I was a bit optimistic in my previous post to call this a "moderately cold" air mass that was about to settle in over us. This is cold. Very cold. Not as cold as, say, Alaska, but still, quite cold.

This is, however, nowhere near the all time (at least since 1928) record low temp; that was -21 degrees on Feb 3, 1950. And it's not too unusual for a winter here to have a couple of cold snaps down into the single digits. Usually the arctic blast lasts less than a week before moderating.

It's nice to not have the typical fog inversion layer over us currently. The inversion happens here in the winter whenever a ridge of high pressure sets in over the Pacific Northwest. Years ago, they didn't occur all that often, but in recent years they have been noticeably more frequent.

Or perhaps it just seems that way as I get older and more easily bored and sometimes even irritated by DAY AFTER DAY AFTER DAY of gloomy dark gray depressing skies where the temperature is cold and hardly changes a couple of degrees in 24 hours and we have to hear about how sunny and beautiful it is in Portland and up on Mt Hood above the fog and the whole thing absolutely sucks. But maybe that's just me.

Enjoy the non-inversion days while they last (until the east wind kicks in, probably).