December Revisited

Compared to historical averages, December in Hood River was much colder, with average wind speed and rainfall equivalent (rain plus melted snow).

The average temperature was 3.4 degrees colder than long term averages, and 4.0 degrees colder than more recent averages (2000-2007). Wind speeds were average, with SSE winds predominating. Note that the calculation for wind direction is notoriously skewed, especially when the winds come from every which direction during the month.

The first half of the month was pretty boring, weather-wise. There was a high wind gust of 34 mph on Dec 12, as weather patterns started to shift. The second half: not nearly so boring (to put it mildly). Arctic air moved in Dec 14, followed by weeks of snow and ice. See previous posts for some of the more lurid details.

The variety of weather was also unusually capricious. Relatively warm westerly chinook winds raised morning temperatures dramatically on a couple of occasions, only to plunge back down later. On Dec 31, we registered a chinook gust of 33, while Tom's westside weather station had a gust of 50 mph!

There was at least one official record set in December. That occurred on Dec 1, where the high of 57 surpassed the previous record (56 in 1939). Now snowfall, that's a different story. Since there was snow on the ground from Dec 15 thru the end of the month, and it was snowing/compacting/snowing more/compacting more all the time, I don't have any official daily snowfall amounts from MCAREC for that time period. Hopefully we will at some point. But I am pretty sure that new "snow depth" records were set from 12/18 through at least 12/28. This was the most amount of snow on the ground since 1980, and probably surpassed 1980 in number of days of record snow depth.

The data below is from our home weather station. The "historical average" numbers for temperature and rainfall are from the Hood River MCAREC data. Historical wind average is from our own station's 2000 to 2007 data. Note that average wind speeds include all 24 hours of the day and night, which is why they are way lower than daytime peak winds. In addition, the wind speed at our station is considerably lower than on the Columbia River.

	High	Low	Average	Historical Average
Temperature (F)	57	9	32.7	36.1
Wind (mph)	34		1.7	1.6
Rainfall (in)	0.98		5.57 (total)	5.81