Another La Niña winter arrives in Seattle and the Puget Sound region

After starting fall off on an unseasonably dry and warm note, the Seattle area is ushering in the coldest start to December in nearly four decades.

If the recent snow was any indication, that third consecutive La Niña forecasters have been promising is here. State climatologist Nick Bond spoke with KUOW's Angela King about what's in store for the region.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Angela King: You know, I started questioning last month if that La Niña was actually going to unfold. After setting a new dry spell record for November, though, it looks like we came pretty close to catching up with our rain totals for last month, correct?

Nick Bond: Yeah, that's correct. Fall lasted about a week, so we're catching up. And I think we're liable to do pretty well in terms of precipitation in the winter ahead.

Are La Niña patterns typically marked by steady precipitation, or are these big dumps of rain and snow more typical?

It's always episodic each winter, and La Niña winters are no exception to that. In particular, we sometimes get storm systems off the Pacific and typical temperatures. But then, intermittently, we'll get the storms more out in the northwest or even north that give us some cooler temperatures. That never lasts all winter. Just when exactly those episodes happen and how long they last and how severe they are vary from case to case.

You recently said in an interview with the Columbia Basin Herald that "natural variability could kind of overwhelm the climate change signal." What do you mean by that?

Well, we have year-to-year fluctuations in the weather. The long-term trends that we're seeing in temperatures are unmistakable, but they can be swamped by those fluctuations from year to year. This November is probably going to be the third coldest going back over a century. That doesn't mean that Novembers, in general, aren't warming. It's just that, when you have a highly unusual situation, it can mask those slow trends we're seeing in the weather and climate.

How about the timing of our recent lowland snow? Has this been typical?

It is on the early side. We have had very cold weather here in November, but November 1985 was a lot colder than this one. But, you know, that's a long ways back. So, this is unusual. La Niña's effects tend to kick in a little bit more after the start of the calendar year. So, this is on the early side, but it's not without precedent.

I was checking the U.S. Drought Monitor, and it still lists all of the state except for the far southeast corner as being abnormally dry or in a moderate drought. Does that surprise you so late in the year?

Well, not really just given how warm and dry our summer into early fall was. Even though you look outside and go "what's this about drought," we still have deficits. Soil moisture contents are kind of on the low side. Now, I don't think it's going to be a problem. Chances are we're going to have decent or maybe even higher than usual amounts of precipitation for the remainder of winter. But right now, we're still clawing our way out of a dry period.

Well, while we know that rain is needed, there's always the concern for flooding and the role that climate change plays on all of this. Just this week, the federal government announced the Quinault Indian Nation and two other tribes would receive $25 million each to help them move their communities to higher ground. The Seattle Times actually described the Quinault as "just one of many tribal communities now bearing the brunt of climate change despite contributing very little to it."

So, how significant is it that these communities are having to physically move their homes and establishments like their courthouses and post offices?

I think it's highly significant. They have a history there, their culture. So to have to pack up and move, that's hard. But it is something that seems to be inevitable. It makes more sense to relocate rather than try to defy nature.

In this case, for the Quinault, a big problem has to do with river flooding coinciding with especially high tides. As sea level rises and as our floods get stronger, those episodic problems I mentioned just are going to be worse and worse. You can't always engineer your way out of a situation with levees and dikes.

So, are parts of our state facing the same predicted fate as, say, Miami? We hear people say it's going to be underwater one day. What are the climate forecast models saying about the potential for that happening here, if they're saying anything about that?

Yeah, for the most part, it's a different situation in Florida. Here we have, obviously, much higher terrain than Florida. Moreover, there are parts of our state that, from a geological point of view, are still rebounding from the last ice age. So, sea level isn't necessarily rising in spots. Just north of the Quinault, the Makah Tribe have their own climate change issues, but sea level rise is not one of them. We do face some problems, to be sure with, with climate change and what the the ocean is doing, but it's not quite the same as Miami. Moreover, Miami is located on top of very porous limestone; the water can actually come up from below. So there's things we can do here that they can't really do in southern Florida.

Fascinating. Well, Nick, I know you're a climatologist, not the Lorax. We know you don't speak for the trees, but what's your take on a recent report that says Seattle lost 255 acres of tree canopy between 2016 and 2021? An arborist for the city says heat and drought aren't the only climate change forces affecting the trees, basically saying everything's trying to come for these trees right now.

Yeah, that's right, especially in our forests. There are types of bark beetles and other pests that tend to have higher survival rates when the winters aren't as cold. We're seeing the kind of losses from pest damage in our forests that we get just from not having as cold weather as we used to have.

Moreover, there's development in the area, so we're losing tree canopy in that regard. That's important because trees really help when we have hot weather. We know that some of the less fortunate communities in the area don't have as much tree canopy, and they tend to be hotter. So from an environmental justice point of view, the places where we're losing some of those trees are the places which could benefit from them the most.

What was your take on the COP27 United Nations Climate Change Conference that wrapped up last month in Egypt? Was there a significant development or an issue you think needed more addressing?

I'm not sure what else could be done at this point. One part that I thought was interesting, even though there wasn't really a mechanism prescribed at how to address it: There was the recognition by the developed part of the world that the developing nations are impacted by climate change. We'll need some funding to deal with it. But how will that funding be used to mitigate the changes that are happening? My understanding is that that isn't clear at all. At least there's a recognition that the nations that have mostly contributed to the problem bear some responsibility, though, and maybe something will be done about it.