PORT ANGELES — This isn’t exactly the year to make the case that things are warming up.
But a group of Peninsula College students and their instructor have published a study of 30 years of weather data to find that the North Olympic Peninsula is getting a little warmer and drier.
The report is based on new temperature and precipitation “normals” released this summer by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center.
The new normals are for 1981 to 2010. The old normals were based on information collected from 1971 to 2000.
“This report provides Peninsula residents a fingertip overview of local climate,” said study author Dwight Barry, a Peninsula College environmental science, statistics and geography instructor who also directs the school’s NASA lab.
When the new normals are applied, January is about 3 degrees warmer in the Port Angeles-Sequim area. It’s about 1.5 degrees warmer in January elsewhere on the Peninsula.
Summers were slightly drier over the past 30 years, Barry said.
Annual precipitation is down about 2 percent across the Peninsula.
The change in annual precipitation translates to about 2 inches less of rain in Forks, four-tenths of an inch less in Port Angeles and eight-hundredths of an inch less in Sequim.
Spring and fall remained essentially the same, Barry said.
“This information helps place current weather into a historical context — what you see every night on the news when the forecaster compares the day’s weather to normal conditions,” Barry said.
“It has many other lesser known uses, though, including utilities’ energy load planning and helping experts recommend when it might be best to start your spring garden.”
The 45-page report, called “New Climate Normals for the Olympic Peninsula,” can be found at www.tinyurl.com/3b5kxws.
It was prepared by Barry and students Brenna Mack and Shea McDonald of Port Angeles, Brandon Massey of Bremerton and Chris DeSisto of Renton.
“Brenna did all of the maps, and Shea and Chris and Brandon were crunching all of the data,” Barry said.
McDonald prepared graphs to go along with the numbers.
The Peninsula Daily News reported in July that Port Angeles, Sequim and Port Townsend would each see an increase in their normal temperature and a slight decrease in precipitation when the 30-year normals took effect Aug. 1.
Barry and his team took it a step further, using 10 National Weather Service stations scattered around Clallam and Jefferson counties.
The stations used in the study were the Quillayute Airport, Forks, Sappho, Elwha Ranger Station, Port Angeles, Sequim, Port Townsend, Chimacum, Quilcene and Clearwater.
“It’s sort of a spinoff of a NASA project we’ve been doing for the last few years,” Barry said in an interview, referring to ongoing research on Olympic Mountain snowpack and long-term climate trends.
Barry said his biggest surprise from the recent study was that annual rainfall in Sequim is rarely — if ever — average.
Only twice in the past 30 years, in 1988 and in 1998, has Sequim’s annual precipitation come within a half-inch of its 16.02-inch average.
“We have wet years and we have dry years,” Barry said.
“In the rain shadow, ‘average’ definitely does not mean ‘typical.’”
Barry said the Peninsula is “generally warming” and that the recent study provides a “small glimpse of that change.”
If the region keeps warming, water resources in dry places like the Dungeness Valley could suddenly become “very scare,” said Barry, whose research on snowpack is in review for scientific journals Climatic Change and Water Resources Research.
He added that the U.S. Historical Climatology Network is a better place to get data to study climate change.
The NASA lab was created in 2006 through an agreement between Peninsula College and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory in Sequim, North Olympic Peninsula Resource Conservation and Development Council and other groups.
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Reporter Rob Ollikainen can be reached at 360-417-3537 or at rob.ollikainen@peninsuladailynews.com.
