My Adventures and Places Life Takes Me: A Historical Pacific Northwest Heat Wave

Okay, let's make one thing clear the Pacific Northwest (especially Western Washington) does not get this hot. We might hit 90 degrees from time to time and maybe 100 degrees one day over the summer but never a constant pounding of heat. We were warned by several news outlets, blogs and meteorologists over the past week. The heat that was about to hit us was a highly unusual weather pattern that statistically has less than a 1-in-several-thousand-year chance of occurring is was place over the PNW, with a record strong high pressure area known as a "heat dome" and was sitting over Washington State and British Columbia.

This heat dome was yielding temperatures 25-50 degrees above average across multiple states and BC.
This heat, combined with worsening drought, was raising risk of wildfires across multiple Western states, with some large blazes erupting in California on June 27th and 28th.
It was also causing power demand to spike at a time when hydropower resources are lower than usual.
All of Oregon, Washington and Idaho, plus portions of California, Montana and Nevada were under excessive heat watches and warnings.
Portland, Oregon, set an all time temperature of 112 degrees on June 26th, and eclipsed that on June 27th, with a high of 115 degrees so far.
In Seattle, the temperature reached 104 degrees on June 26th, which broke the existing all-time record. It exceeded that record on June 27th, standing at 106 degrees at 6:00 p.m.
Seattle had never had back-to-back 100 degree days before this weekend.
Canada is also seeing extreme heat, with the country's June high temperature record tie on June 25th and smashed on June 26th at Lytton in BC by nearly 3 degrees, with a high of 116 degrees. This has been broken again on June 27th, with the same locating recording 117 degrees.
To put this into perspective, this means that a location in BC, not known as an extremely hot providence in June, equaled Las Vegas' all-time hottest temperature.
Mountains in the Northwest have been extremely warm with freezing levels located above the peak of Mount Rainier at times. This is resulting in rapidly melting snow and ice, from the peaks of Oregon to the mountains of BC.
There are three main reasons the PNW is so hot. The first is tied to the heat dome itself, which causes air to sink, or compress, warming as it does so and keeping the skies clear and the second has to do with the location of the heat dome.
The feature is park to the north-northeast of the region, at the same time as an upper-level low-pressure are lurks offshore.
Due to the clockwise flow of air around the high pressure, easterly winds are blowing from high-to-low elevation areas, adding more compressional cooling.
The third fact is climate change. Studies have shown that sever heat events such as this one are now on average about 3-5 degrees hotter than they would be without the many decades of emissions of greenhouse gasses from fossil fuel burning, deforestation and other human activities.
This warming is also thought to be altering weather patterns in a way that makes strong heat domes more common and prolonged.

It started here on Thursday, June 24th and was here until about Monday June 27th. The people who have lived or grew up here in the PNW have never experienced a summer like this before. It was brutal. We live in a region that doesn't get this hot so most house holds don't have AC because it really isn't needed. I grew up without AC. I didn't have it until the first house we lived in when we moved to Lacey back in 2016. It was nice to have. When we were forced to move to a different house, the one we currently live in, doesn't and we desperately needed it over those five days. I know we should have gotten one but it wasn't in the current budget at the time. We were going to have to wait it out and deal with it. We will have one by next summer.

On Thursday, June 24th it was still 73 degrees around 10 p.m. that night. It was as warm indoors as it was outdoors. I went to go water my plants and flowers in the front yard. I knew they were going to bake over the next few days. We have never gotten this warm this early in the summer. By the time this was going to be done with my front yard was going to be brown. It doesn't usually get brown until mid August. Fire danger will be very high over the next two to three months.

We were suppose to have a yard sale this weekend but Dad and I decided to postpone it to another weekend just because it was going to be very hot and we didn't want to sit in it or subject patrons to it either.

The next day, Friday June 25th, it was already 70 degrees by 9 a.m. Again, we are the PNW and we don't get temperatures like that early in the morning. Around 9 p.m. it was still 80 degrees. The house was around 85 degrees and it was not going to cool off that night. We were not going to get our evening cool down period we usually get for the next morning. This is going to be rough.

On Saturday, June 26th it was 80 degrees by 9 a.m. once again. It reached 104 degrees by 4:15 p.m. while Mom and I were out doing the shop hop in the greater Tacoma area. At 8 p.m. it was 97 degrees and our house was very warm inside. It was miserable. Once it reached 10:00 p.m. it cooled down to 82 degrees but inside the house was 85 degrees. We had three fans going and the cat's spent most of the day laying on the floor trying to stay cool. It was hard to sleep and I didn't get to bed until around 2 a.m., it was 74 degrees.

By the time I woke up at 9:30 a.m. on Sunday, June 27th, it was already 85 degrees outside. It didn't cool down very much over the course of the night. That day was a scorcher. We left the two fans on for the cat's and they again, spent most of the day laying on the floor sprawled out. Ben and I went to the river that afternoon and spent almost three hours there. It felt good. That evening around 8 p.m. it was 90 degrees outside. We noticed our shampoo was runnier than it usually was when we showered and our butter was melting on the counter so Ben put it in the fridge. We tried going to bed and at 11:15 p.m. it was 80 degrees outside and 88 degrees inside the house. It was a really rough night of sleeping. So sweaty...even with three fans going. I hated that I had to work the next day, in doors, without a cooling down period.

The next day, June 28th, it pretty much hovered around 85-88 degrees throughout the night inside the house and stayed that way when I got up to go to work. Sleeping was definitely sweaty. I didn't actually go to bed until after midnight because it was so hot. By 7 a.m. it was already 75 degrees outside. I set up the three fans inside the living room, wore my neck drape soaked in cool water (I got up several times throughout the day to re-wet it) and it kept me somewhat comfortable. By 9:00 a.m. it was already 85 degrees outside. This was the first sight of Oliver panting. I gave them some of the ice balls from the freezer thinking they would play with them or lick them to stay cool. By 10:15 a.m. it reached 90 degrees outside and by noon it was almost 100 degrees! It was 106 degrees by 3 p.m. and I could not wait until work was done so I could not be in front of my computer.

It reached it's final high by 5 p.m. that evening with a record breaking temperature of 108 degrees. This is the hottest it's been ever in Thurston County. We broke many records today. The kitties were so hot and I managed to put a wet towel on Wade while he was miserable on the floor. I told both of them that I was sorry it was so hot but it was beyond our control. We wetted bandanas and wrapped them around our heads while wearing our cooled neck wrap.

The kitties got so hot that they eventually laid in the bathtub because they were so hot. I felt so bad for them.

It finally started cooling down around 8 p.m. and by 9 it was 88 degrees so Ben and I sat with our feet in the kiddie pool in the front yard. The house was still really hot inside so we opened the windows and put the box fans on the sills to bring in the cool air. By 11:00 p.m. the marine layer off the coast had made it inland cooling the area to 74 degrees. We were able to have a night of cool-ish sleep.

That was a rough span of five days. We are definitely getting an AC unit before next summer.

A post from July 1, 2021

Much of the higher Cascades set record or near record temperatures on June 26th and June 27th with temperatures in the 80's and 90's around the pass and hiking levels. Near the top of Mount Rainier temperatures were far, far above freezing. With all that snow and ice up there from our snowy winter subjected to temperature 40-60 degrees above freezing, snowmelt was rather extreme. The recent heatwave resulted in significant snowmelt and high river flows, bringing sediment downstream.

All that sediment flow was captured on satellite imagery as the silt and muck flowed down rivers into Puget Sound, leaving noticeable brownish color in the water. One of the most dramatic scenes was around Tacoma, where the Puyallup River carried down mud and silt from a melting Mount Rainier.

Longmire hit 105 degrees, tying its all time record, according to the National Parks Service and farther up on Paradise, a the ranger station, hit 91 on June 28th after reaching 88 on June 27th. There had been just under 60 inches of snow up there before the heat wave began, now it's down to 19 inches. Near the summit, at Camp Muir (10,100 feet), hit levels of 62 degrees on June 27th and then reached 68 degrees on June 28th. That meant summit temperatures were likely in the 40's. The freezing level was registered at just over 18,200 feet by a weather balloon that was launched from Forks on June 28th.