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Friday, February 23, 2007

Living in a Black Hole

I live in a black hole. While there seems to be a lot of doppler radar sites throughout the northwest in populated areas (e.g., Seattle, Vancouver,Portland, Eugene, etc.), The Daily World reports that this radar coverage doesn't seem to extend to most of the Washington and Oregon coast.

The lack of adequate radar coverage genuinely affects one aspect of living far from the urban corridor -- our weather forecasts are a lot more hit and miss than in other places. In fact, we recently learned that much of the forecasting for Washington's coast is nothing more than guess work.

When my wife & I first moved to Aberdeen in December 2005, we noticed on the Weather Channel that rain never seems to show up on radar. Yes, it could be raining buckets here, yet, if you looked at the radar either on the Weather Channel website or on TV, Grays Harbor appeared to be precipitation free.

It seems that the radar that purports to cover Grays Harbor & Pacific Counties actually is the Camano Island radar and said radar genuinely doesn't extend this far. It is blocked by the Olympic Mountains!

Of course, for most months of the year, it's not that big of a deal. From October through March, it rains. It rains a lot and it rains often. In fact, during the winter, it rains most everyday.

You don't need doppler radar nor to be a weatherman to figure that out.

1 comment:

  1. How strange. You think that's a problem that someone would have incentive to have resolved some time ago.

    ReplyDelete

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