Rain, rain please stay

The rain report for May is in this week’s issue. For more than two years, month after month, a rain report summarizing the local weather from the last month’s weather data at WSU’s Mount Vernon Memorial Highway research station has been compiled. Why?

Maybe it is because frogs cannot read. Some say, placed in a pot of water, frogs cannot ascertain or react to water slowly being brought to a boil. But people can read. Whether it is this week’s readers or great grandchildren or alien archeologists digging through archives in the 22nd century, folks have evidence in these pages that someone was paying attention to the weather.

This year has been dry. Only a very wet February, with almost two more inches of precipitation than normal this century, has kept this year’s rainfall from being higher than 19% below the century average. You are reading this in a week when “June gloom,” as a friend calls it, may have descended, bringing overcast skies and even rain, to the Skagit valley, but this, too, shall pass.

Now, local weather is not the same as climate. On a four billion year old planet not two years or four years nor twenty-four years nor 104 years does a trend make. Reduced rainfall over a stretch of four years is just that. Even nine of the 15 driest Mays occurring since 2012 is only 60% of this century’s 22 years.

But pattern or not, the climate is changing. Reading it in your community newspaper is not new, or surprising, news. In May the state’s Department of Ecology issued a drought advisory, except for counties touching Puget Sound. The National Interagency Fire Center’s “Predictive Services” outlook for the summer is “Drought expanded and intensified over the West, especially in California. More than 87% of the West is now categorized in drought and over half the West in the highest two categories of drought. Snowpack set new record lows in parts of the West, including the Sierra, in May.”

The Associated Press – AP – sends out stories to its member newspapers of forecasts for another year – not summer and not seasons, but many months – of wildfire danger.

All this is larger evidence than rain data from the western Skagit valley summarized monthly. Local newspapers specialize in the immediate and what is in front of us now. This might not be the week to wave the flag of a dry summer ahead, given the rain that might be coming down even as you read this. But the rain will pass through. July will likely be dry. From Canada’s British Columbia down to California’s Sierra Nevada, the potential for prolonged fires is high.

If we have a summer of grey skies, it is likely not to be overcast from thunderstorms coming, but smoke from fires hundreds of miles south, north or east of here.

This is not scientific, predictive or pessimistic. It is last year and the year before last developing the same way this year.

This is another example of both how large the world is and how shrunken it has become and how quickly we find out we are all connected to one another. How to act locally when factors and forces around the globe blow our way without us having any immediate control?