The Big Heat

2020 was kind of suck-ass here in Portland.

First antifa and BLM ran riot in the streets and burned the whole goddamn town down.

And then we had massive forest fires that burned the whole goddamn woods down.

And then we had goddamn MAGAts that came around trying to sweep the goddamn ashes into Idaho's goddamn trash bin.

Jesus wept!

And then - just this past weekend - we had a giant, creepy iron high-pressure dome or something come oozing in off the Pacific and hunker down over us for three days or so bringing the big heat.

As in, 115 degree heat.

Cliff Mass at his Weather Blog has some terrific posts discussing what happened and why. Here was his warning Sunday afternoon:

Tomorrow: The Day of Unimaginable Extremes

But tomorrow, it all goes horribly wrong.  The thermal trough moves northward and westward, pushing the strong easterly, downslope flow northward to over the central Cascades (see map for 11 AM Monday).  The sinking air will compress/warm as it sinks.

The burst of downslope, compressional heating will cause temperatures to warm beyond the experience of any living inhabitant of the region (see forecast temperatures at 5 PM Monday).  

Temperatures will rise above 112F on the eastside of Puget Sound and above 100F for everyone more than a few miles from the water.  Portland will be similarly warm.  And so will the lower elevations of the Columbia Basin. 

The first and most obvious question is; "is this due to a warming climate"?

And Mass' answer (and mine, since his data appears quite sound) is; sorta;

"...a number of people have asked about the role of global warming on this event.   

Is global warming contributing to this heatwave?  The answer is certainly yes.  

Would we have had a record heatwave without global warming.  The answer is yes as well. 

Our region has warmed by up to 1-2F during the past fifty years and that will enhance the heatwave. Increasing CO2 is probably the biggest contributor to the warming. 

But consider that the temperature anomalies (differences from normal) during this event will reach 30-35F. The proximate cause of this event is a huge/persistent ridge of high pressure, part of a highly anomalous amplification of the upper-level wave pattern. 

There is no evidence that such a wave pattern is anything other than natural variability (I have done research on this issue and published in the peer-reviewed literature on this exact topic). 

So without global warming, a location that was 104F would have been 102F. Still a severe heat wave, just slightly less intense."

I do wonder if the intensity of the tropical storm that helped create this immense high pressure ridge might have been heightened by the warming climate...but, I defer to the subject matter experts.

So how did we do here in the Fire Direction Center?

Pretty much just fine.

I hid inside all weekend, pretty much, other than taking my Bride and the Larvae to the airport Sunday morning for their pilgrimage to the Gramma Shrine.

It was pretty damn hot when I dropped them off at 11:00am...by Monday morning it was insane:

By Monday afternoon it had gone waaaayyyy past insane...

The Little House is one of the fortunate older ones here in the Portland region to have had central air installed. So I cranked that baby and kept it cranked all through until the heat broke Monday night.

Mind you, when the outside of the house is 112 degrees even the butch-est air conditioner struggles. On Monday afternoon the thermostat was set to 72 but the interior temperature was 83. That was the best the poor bastard could do; fight a delaying action against the heat.

It worked well enough.

With the family off tickling grandparental fancies just the cats shared the Big Heat with me.

Mostly they were smart enough to stay indoors to do their eat-and-sleep-repeat cat thing. But, being cats, they couldn't STAY indoors, so every hour or so they'd swagger out into the heat in a manner entirely inappropriate for an animal wearing a fur coat.

Once there, mind, they'd flop over and just lie there, like, maybe it was too hot to do anything, like, move. No shit, cats.  No wonder you aren't the top of the food chain, never mind the whole opposable-thumbs thing.

The residents that suffered the most were the vegetables.

My daughter has recently developed a huge taste for gardening. So the Little Yard is now verdant with plants of all kinds, mostly flowers. We have random sunflowers along edges and by fences, potted plants on benches and tables, raised beds full of goodies...they're all over the place, and the Girl is besotted with her flowers.

And it is flowers. The Bride and I are raising tomatoes and squash and peas. The Girl is raising dahlias and zinnias and passionflowers.

(The Boy is raising nothing but digital hell in the HALO universe, so he's not really in the frame...)

Well, most of the in-ground plants came through the big heat okay...

...a little wilted by Monday night when I went out to water again (I'd watered in the morning, as well) but still living. But the potted ones..?

...not so much. Three of the Girl's beloved dahlias look pretty fried. I'm still watering when I do the rest of the garden, but I'm not hopeful.

Meanwhile, two-thirds of the fire direction crew are unimpressed by the historical (and historically awful) event they just lived through, as the Senior Enlisted remarked when we woke up Tuesday and walked out into a cool morning;

Little Cat: My butt cold. Why my butt cold? Where hot?
Me: It's gone, the heat wave is over. We're back to normal-ish.
LC: My butt cold. No like!
M: Yeah, well, it is what it is. Have some cat food.
LC: No! Where hot? No like! You fix!
M: I can't fix the weather, doof. Look, there's some nice kibbles.
LC: Meh. You fix.
M:
LC:
M: Fuckit, Imma drink my coffee. You do whatever.
LC: ...the fuck? The goddamn service around this place has completely gone to hell. I'm going over here until I can speak to your manager.

K. Good luck with that.