The Climate CIRCulator

Following a record-breaking wet winter, one of the coldest some parts of the Northwest have experienced in over two decades, many were looking forward to the warm and dry summer months. This summer delivered and then some.

The Northwest, British Columbia, and California experienced an exceptionally warm and surprisingly dry summer, helping create an especially busy and unexpectedly destructive fire season.

So how warm, dry, and fiery was the summer of 2017 for the Northwest? We give you the numbers in this Northwest Climate Currents.

Let’s start with a definition of summer.

Climatologists define summer as June through August, even though for most of the Northwest—that’s Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and western Montana—the first weeks of June can be gloomy and wet and the first weeks of September sunny and dry. So, let’s provide a Northwest-specific definition of summer. Let’s consider summer to be the 90-day period…