Weather & Climate - Blog #1

Cannon Beach, Oregon is located along the beautiful and rugged western Pacific coastline. There are two main weather stations, one in mid-town at 20 ft. elevation and one nearby at 25 ft. elevation.  For this project, we will be monitoring both along with several other websites to gather  current and historical weather/climate data. 

I have posted (see below) some graphs on the weather trends, but wanted to point out other interesting facts.  Although Cannon Beach does not have the highly variable temperatures as many inland locations, its' coastal location has helped to moderate and keep the weather patterns relatively consistent over time.  Historically, August has been the warmest and driest month of the year, December has been the coolest, and November has been the wettest. The highest recorded temperature was 105 degrees in July 1961, the lowest recorded temperature was 5 degrees in December 1972. 

The Bowen Ratio is a mathematical equation for calculating the ratio of heat energy used for sensible heating to heat energy used for latent heating.  Overall, globally the ratio is 0.96 for land and 0.11 for oceans.  Since Cannon Beach is a coastal, cool and wet region, the latent heat flux is more important for this area and the Bowen Ratio will be low similar to the ratio for the oceans, possibly around .15 to .20 maximum is my guess.

We also were instructed to experiment with Geebitt to determine the effect of increasing/decreasing the earth’s surface albedo and greenhouse factor.  I will post separately some of the resulting figures, but in summary for both factors when the numbers were even slightly changed the resulting temperature changes were very dramatic.  For my location, these temperature variations could cause rising sea levels, dramatic weather pattern changes, possible flooding or drought, and most likely have devastating results for the area’s animal and plant life.

Sources:
http://www.wunderground.com
http://icp.giss.nasa.gov/education/geebitt
http://www.wrcc.dri.edu/ams/glossary.html
http://www.mendeley.com/research/characteristics
http://www.city-data.com
http://en.wikipedia.org
http://www.weather.com
http://forecast.weather.gov
http://climate.fizber.com
http://userpages.umbc.edu