There is an interesting phenomenon in Washington weather that I never noticed when I lived here before.
I always used to characterize WA weather as being sunny in the summer and rainy in the winter, but that’s not actually the way I’ve noticed it working this year.
What I’ve noticed is that it’s sunny (more or less) during the summer, then it rains during the fall, then it gets too cold to really rain all that much during the dead of winter, then it rains again in the spring.
For an astronomer, this means that there are two distinct possibilities for clear nights; one is the sultry days of July and August. The other (to my surprise) are during the frigid nights of December and January.
There have been a lot of clear nights lately, and as it’s gotten colder, the nights have gotten clearer.
It was 28º in the driveway this morning at 8am, and it was 25º down in the valley. The skies are clear and bright, with Mount Jupiter and Mount Rainier clear against the sky. There was some fog in the valley, as the rising sun evaporated some of the frost.
The lawn was solid white in frost this morning, and the roads were dry but frozen.