Boring winter in Seattle for extreme weather lovers

If you’re bored this winter and you can’t figure out why, take a look out the window. It might be the boring Seattle weather.

“We haven’t had anything extreme or interesting,” said University of Washington atmospheric scientist Cliff Mass. “No snowstorms here in the lowland, no windstorms, really of any magnitude and no real flooding.”

Mass got several complaints about the tame weather so he helped put together a Seattle Winter Excitement Index (SWEI) based on temperature, snow and other winter weather components.

“How many times the temperature has gotten really warm, above 60 or below 25 or how often the winds get to 30 knots, or more, how often we get one inch of snow in a month, things like that,” explained Mass.

What he found was that this has been the most uninteresting winter weather season since records have been kept. Actually, a tie with 1963.

“People enjoy a big storm. I mean there’s something very basic, very religious about it and they’re just not getting it this year,” said Mass.

What does it mean? “Nothing,” said Mass.

“The mistake that a lot of people make is they look at a particularly boring winter or they look at a winter with some interesting weather and assume that that has to do with global warming or something changing, but at this point, there’s no reason to think that anything very unusual is happening,” Mass concluded.

Sometimes our weather is interesting and sometimes it’s just plain boring.