1. There isn't really anything else exciting to blog about right now.
2. It's the time of year when weather matters
3. A lot of people are
Weather does matter a lot in terms of bicycling because sometimes it can absolutely miserable and other times it is amazing. But if you're a bike racer or determined bike commuter, you have to be able to train and ride in any type of weather.
Now there seems to be plenty of articles out there on how to ride in any kind of weather, but I haven't seen much in terms of understanding the root cause of all your weather-related bicycling problems - the actual weather. Well, there is my favorite weather blog: Cliff Mass Weather Blog, but that's really only for the true weather nerds.
In daily life I frequently hear people saying stuff that clearly indicates they haven't taken a detailed enough look at the weather forecast. Here are some examples:
- "what the heck, it was like sunny this morning and now at 1pm it's all rainy! arrgghh!"
- "there aren't even seasons anymore!"
- "It was a frickin' MONSOON STORM out there today!"
- "where the heck is summer??!?!!?" <- when said before July 5th any year.
I'm going to share some of my slightly-more-educated-than-the-normal person knowledge I have about weather which has mainly come from anecdotal observations, my internal reasoning and plenty of hours surfing weather forecast websites. I aim to divulge some information that is almost always true, but of course when predicting the future there is no guarantee of truth. I am drawn to forecasting in general because my day job is associated with the transportation forecasting business so I really appreciate how well they have got down their forecasts. The short term results from their forecasts are actually quite accurate nowadays and it really inspires me to try to do as well in the transportation forecasting area.
I'm obviously going to focus on Pacific Northwest weather since that's all I know. I hope to cover all seasons of the year ultimately in this series. The next post will focus on the most exciting, favorite, happy and joyous weather type of the Pacific Northwest that has earned it a national reputation that draws people from around the world:
The RAIN!!
But as a precursor to all this, I present you with the weather forecasting website I use. Please go visit it and become familiar with it, because I'll be referencing it a lot in this series of posts.
http://www.wunderground.com/
