Snow!
I'm sort of a fan of understatement, so I'll just say this: the weather's been a bit unusual. Not just in the past week, but this entire year. I wonder if an entire year of strange weather is enough to count as climate change, but in the Pacific Northwest where I live, where the scenic change this time of year is typically from green to gray,
Summer is six weeks of glorious sunshine. Then it ends. Autumn begins with a cold snap that kills the foliage, turns it brown, followed by a rain that washes it away. From that time until the end of Spring, we get gray skies and wet earth.
This year, however, we've had actual seasons. At first I thought I was crazy. The leaves changed, and I noticed colors in the landscape that I had never before seen. Purple brush, bright orange and yellow deciduous trees contrasting themselves from their coniferous counterparts (I wish I had taken photos that would be good representations of this, but, alas, I did not). I wondered how I could have lived here my entire life, and not perceived these changes. An arborist friend explained to me, we received an abnormal amount of rain in August (2.68" in 2008 versus 0.88" average). This precipitation helped keep the trees vital at a time when they usually become susceptible to drought. The result was trees keeping their leaves longer at the end of the season instead of the leaves just turning brown and falling off. The days of this Autumn past were clear and bright, not obscured by an endless drizzle. It was as pleasant as any that I can remember.
Jump ahead to today, the winter solstice, the first official day of Winter. There are two feet of accumulated snow outside my window. When it snows in Seattle, the flakes are large, heavy and wet. We get a few inches of accumulation, the city is shut down for a day, then it melts. The snow outside right now defies this description. It is soft and powdery. It does not make good snowmen. It is lasting. Autumn ended, and, right on cue, we now have a definitive Winter. This is not how Northwest weather is supposed to behave. This is not how the climate around here is expected to act. The transition from Autumn to Winter to Spring is supposed to be imperceptible. The only visual signifier is the hours of daylight, getting conspicuously shorter, then gradually longer. We're further north than pretty much any other major US metropolis (excluding Alaska, of course). We're two degrees of latitude north of Montreal, for fuck's sake (the lack of daylight affects me--I digress).
Anyway, the point of this post is this: other parts of this nation experience four distinct seasons. Seattle does not, at least it didn't.
