I discovered Cliff Mass's invaluable weather blog shortly after moving to Seattle. The blog is great because it goes far beyond merely trying to predict the weather and includes a lot more data and explanation of what's happening, often including a discussion of how the prediction was made. So when I saw that we wrote a whole book about our regional weather I was too intrigued to pass it up.
Unfortunately, the book is a bit of a disappointment. I don't regret reading it and learned a bunch of interesting things from it. There are good explanations of interesting geographic anomalies like the Oregon banana belt and the Sequim rain shadow effect. There's also a lot of good stuff about general tendencies in the weather around here. For example the correlation of El Niño with warmer, drier winters, the way fog develops and what it portends, the wind tunnel effect of the Frasier River Valley, and so on. The explanations are scientific, but ably presented in a way that I think most anyone could understand.
The disappointment is that the book contains so much useless weather trivia. For example, after spending a few pages discussing the unusual conditions that produce heavy snow in lowland Seattle, there are even more pages devoted to discussing the details of the half dozen largest storms, complete with dollar damage estimates and number of downed electric lines on Columbus Day, 1962. Who cares!? Who is really into that kind of trivia about "largest" and "highest" and "record-breaking"? I guess we expect this sort of doom loop from the TV weatherman. But why bother to put so much of it into a book? It could have been half as long, or better yet, twice as good, with more technical discussion of specific local weather features. This is what the blog is like when it's at its best.
And when it's at its worst? Well, you just have to ignore his Statler and Waldorf impression when it comes to anything other than the weather.
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