Portland, OR

Dear Jimmy Buffett,

Thank you for providing me with the perfect blog title today.

Love & many margaritas,

Sarah

~*~*~*~*~*~

Yesterday I made a list of 10 Things I Love About Portland and for the next ten entries I’m going to address each one. Some of them will just be general overviews while others (like this one) can encompass exactly what I want to share in fewer words. (Can you imagine me addressing “Portland’s entertainment scene” in one entry? Yeeeeah, right.)

I admitted yesterday that I love the weather in Portland. I love it when it rains, I love it when it’s sunny, I love it when the wind whips through the Columbia River Gorge and flushes the city out. Portland is the perfect place to live if you want to experience a little bit of most every kind of weather!

A general rundown of Portland’s climatic/location information:
* we’re only 20 feet above sea level (20 feet!)
* we’re 65 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean (an hour’s drive!)
* we’re 30 miles West of the Cascade Range (skiing!)
* we’re 40 miles southwest of Mount St. Helens (8,300 ft. high volcano!)
* we’re 40 miles west of Mt. Hood (11,238 ft. high volcano!)
* we’re living October through May with 90% of our annual rainfall (9% between June & September!)
* we’re one of the lucky areas that (in my opinion) lives with four actual seasons - winter is chilly, damp and grey; spring is green, wet, and colorful; summer is brown, dry (mostly) and still bright green; autumn is cool, about half & half damp/dry, and brightly colored with leaves
* we’re very unaccustomed to snow; on average we have five days a year with “measurable snow,” most often it’s less than two inches and melts within a day or two

Temperature Information:
* 62.6 is the average yearly high temperature while
* 44.5 is the average yearly low

With an 18 degree difference in our average high & low temperatures, it looks like we have rather boring (and sucky) weather, but we really don’t! Sometimes we have extremes:
* 107 degrees in August of 1981
* -3 degrees in February of 1950 (A 110 degree difference in records!)

Portland normally receives about 36.30 inches of rain a year, but like the temperatures, we can have extremes! There are months we receive no rain at all, and then there are months we receive 4.44 inches (October 1994). Often times it feels like we receive a lot more than 4 inches of rain a month, but Portland rain isn’t always heavy rain. I have friends from Ohio who like to laugh about the ways Portland weathermen describe the water falling from our skies:
* rain
* rainfall
* raindrops
* rainstorm
* rain shower
* heavy dew
* liquid sunshine (I think is is my favorite one)
* cloudburst
* mist
* sprinkles
* spit
* stream
* pour
* monsoon
* shower/s
* deluge
* drencher
* drizzle
* flood
* flurry
* precipitation
* cloud-juice (yes, I’ve heard this one)

Now think, you can add all sorts of MODIFIERS to these adjectives to describe the rain … light sprinkles … intermittent drizzle … heavy rainfall. There are at least 275 different ways to describe the water that lands on our hoods. (True Oregonians use a hood instead of an umbrella!)

So, overall, we have pretty diverse weather. We have days that reach a scorching 102 and days that the roads are so iced over even Tri-Met cancels their runs. We have days where no matter the rain gear we use we’re soaked and chilled to the bone and then we have days that are so dry our noses bleed. That’s what I love about Portland’s weather … it’s never the same two days in a row!

Thanks to the National Weather Service for these facts & figures. (They’re not cool enough to get a letter like Jimmy did!)

About Portland OR, Portland Oregon, Portland, Oregon, Jimmy Buffett, The Weather Is Here Wish You Were Beautiful, 10 Things I Love About Portland, weather, rain, sunshine, Cascade Range, Mount St. Helens, Mt. Hood, rainfall, winter, spring, summer, autumn, snow, words for rain, National Weather Service