Columbia Weather Systems

With a nod to the seasonal transition from Winter to Spring, Mark Nelsen, Chief Meteorologist at KPTV, presented his Winter Weather Recap at the Oregon AMS meeting last night. Mark summed up the first few months with his comment: “We’re used to being let down here if you like big winter weather.” And then we experienced one of the coldest Februarys on record with multiple snow events. From the initial forecasted snow non-event that was over-hyped by the media and led to outages of kale in Portland-area grocery stores, Mark offered a lesson for forecasters and media: “In today’s social media world, we must be very careful with weather information.” Shout-out to Kyle Dittmer of Columbia River Inter-Tribal Fish Commission who nailed the forecast for number of snow events at the Annual Winter Weather conference last October! View Mark’s presentation here.

The 26th Annual Winter Weather Forecast Conference is coming up! Save the date for Saturday, October 27th at the  Oregon Museum of Science and Industry (OMSI)  to hear Meteorologists from across the PNW give their predictions for the upcoming winter. The event is hosted by the  Oregon Chapter of The American Meteorological Society (AMS)  and is open to the public with all ages welcome.