Cold, with temperatures often remaining below freezing.
Cloudy most of the time, very little sunshine
Frosty, with freezing fog for days.
Some location in the interior of Alaska? Siberia?
No, the Columbia River basin in East Washington.
Day after day, cold air and low clouds combine over the Columbia Basin (see image below on January 28)
WSDOT highway cams show fog and low clouds almost every day (see example for Jan 14 below)
With endless clouds, the temperature is almost constant and cold – almost freezing for long periods of time.
Here’s something amazing…and unsettling. Temperatures at Patterson in Benton County. For more than half a month, temperatures range from 30 to 35, with many days having almost no variation in the day (daily). Just constant gloom, cold and freezing fog. Very annoyed. I would shoot 20F and blue skies any day.
Even more sad is the measurement of solar irradiance, many days it is less than 100 W/square meter). Some are close to 50. The sun is full around 450 at the end of the month.
For days, Seattle (not known as a winter mecca for sun love) gets significantly more sun.
Ironically, there are a number of completed or planned solar projects in eastern Washington… I doubt they should generate much electricity in the middle of winter.
Why is the Columbia Basin cloudy and cool during the winter?
Because it is a basin in which cold, dense air gathers (see topographic map). Cold air can pass through the Okanagan Valley or it can be generated over the surrounding mountain slopes (by infrared radiation into space) and then settle into the lower elevations of the Basin (thick cold air). dense and tends to sink). The Columbia Basin has only one real exit…. Columbia Gorge… and that’s pretty narrow, limiting the Basin’s ability to “escape” cold air.
Warm air from the west often overwhelms the cold air of the Columbia Basin, creating a sharp inversion in which temperatures increase with altitude. This structure is illustrated by vertical acoustics at Spokane during the morning of January 13 (below). The inversion prevents vertical mixing of the air, helping to “protect” the cold air to a lesser extent.
But it’s even worse than that! Low-lying clouds in the Columbia Basin tend to radiate infrared energy into space, further cooling the icy layer near the surface. It’s like having a cooler on top of the low clouds.
The cold pool Columbia Basin has some other nasty problems. Cold air near the surface can promote freezing rain and ice storms, when warm rain falls into the cold air and is supercooled below freezing. And an inversion can separate strong winds overhead from the “dead air” in a cold lake. The result can be strong wind shear (large variation of wind with altitude) leading to remarkably low-level turbulence – creating a bumpy journey for planes to land in towns like Richland and Lake Moses .
Due to persistent cold air in the Columbia River basin, the region’s climate is one of severe extremes.
Consider the average monthly temperature in the Cities. (below). December and January are cold, with temperatures averaging in the 30s. This is the season for the cold lake in the lower reaches of the Columbia River basin. But something amazing will happen in February. Rising sun is finally having an impact, warming the surface, increasing vertical blending, and weakening/destroying cold. Rising temperatures.
By March, the frozen lake was historic, and the Columbia River basin became warmer than western WA.
Courtesy of Weatherspark
