Weather Information Sources in North Seattle

Dear Diary,

Because my financial situation is becoming exigent, I don't know how long it'll take me to finish the time-consuming work on part VI of "Public Library Hours, Autumn 2023", or that on part II of "Institutional Libraries Long Closed to the Public".  And I don't know when I can get back to hiking, either.

Also, it looks like hiking may still be necessary.  As I told you eight days ago, dear Diary, I found two water fountains not running when I recently re-visited the parks with which we started:  the one in "lower" Ravenna Park, and the one near the tennis courts in Laurelhurst Playfield.  I reported the Ravenna one using the method preferred by the Public Restroom/Drinking Fountain Dashboard, Seattle's "Find It Fix It" mobile phone application, and told only you, dear Diary, about the Laurelhurst one.  Today both are shown as running:

Now, it may be that they really are running, that the Seattle Department of Parks and Recreation's people were already aware of them at the time and fixed them the next day.  But the only way to verify that they're running now is, of course, to hike.  There will, however, be no newspaper in tomorrow's photos.

That said, what prompted me to start writing in you this morning, dear Diary, is something else entirely.  For nearly two months now, one of the three weather records sites I visit daily has been out of commission.  Now, by "weather records" I mean not all-time records, but rather records of routine events, specifically daily low temperatures.  As I think I've already told you, dear Diary, I check three of them most days:

• The theoretically every minute record maintained by the University of Washington Department of Atmospheric Sciences.
• The usually every five minutes record maintained by the US Federal Aviation Administration from Boeing Field.
• And the formerly every hour record maintained by the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration a few blocks from Atmospheric Sciences, on the shore of Portage Bay.

Well, without a third, I lack any way of settling arguments.  For the past couple of weeks, Boeing Field has been reporting much lower low temperatures than UW.  Not that they necessarily have to report the same low, but they haven't done that once since October 3.  Is this a geographical difference, or is it a problem with either thermometer, or what?

Contents of this page:

• The problem
• Weather stations in North Seattle
• So who's right?
• Weather forecasts offered by NOAA

The problem

I should mention two idiosyncracies I have, compared to normal weather reports.  First, I call the low the lowest reading between highs, regardless of what time it is.  This presents problems when the temperature rises or falls steadily for more than 24 hours, which sometimes does happen, so most weather reporters instead state the low for a definite period such as "last night".  Second, I only need one reading at some temperature to call that the low temperature; UW, at least, seems to need more than one, while the Weather Service page for Boeing Field for a long time ignored its five-minute readings completely, counting only its hourly readings at XX:53.  With that said, let's get started:

Date	UW	Boeing	Difference
10/3/2023	54	54	0
10/4/2023	56	53	3
10/5/2023	56	55	1
10/6/2023	53	52	1
10/7/2023	55	48	7
10/8/2023	57	54	3
10/9/2023	59	55	4
10/10/2023	54	50	4
10/11/2023	52	48	4
10/12/2023	51	50	1
10/13/2023	53	48	5
10/14/2023	57	54	3
10/15/2023	58	54	4
10/16/2023	56	50	6
10/17/2023	53	48	5
10/18/2023	55	48	7
10/19/2023	57	50	7
10/20/2023	57	55	2
10/21/2023	54	53	1
10/22/2023	53	52	1
10/23/2023	51	45	6
10/24/2023	47	45	2
10/25/2023	44	42	2
10/26/2023	42	36	6
10/27/2023	38	30	8
10/28/2023	36	28	8
10/29/2023	37	27	10
10/30/2023	41	32	9
10/31/2023	40	30	10
11/1/2023	45	37	8

So has Boeing Field really been eight or more degrees colder than UW almost every night for the past week, or hasn't it?  If it has, will this ever end?  And if it hasn't, which one is wrong?

Well, dear Diary, less than a year ago, I announced a new project:  "Counties of Western Washington", and you haven't heard much about it since.  I haven't abandoned it, but haven't worked on it much recently.  However, in the course of researching the first county to be covered, I learned a lot, and one thing I learned was how to find weather stations, at least those known to NOAA.

In the county I was researching, at that time, several stations showed a pattern I'd already seen in NOAA's UW site's temperature records:  abrupt 8°  to 11°  changes of temperature, first downward, then upward, in its hourly record.  I call these "swoops".

The fundamental tool is a map.  Zoom in on it and, one by one as the zoom factor increases, additional stations are revealed.  Click on the stations and a box pops up showing current information and linking to 3 or 7 days' worth of records.  I'm tolerably sure there are at least fourteen stations in North Seattle, not counting either one at UW.  Shall we meet them, dear Diary?  My concerns are location, what each site records, and whether I see swoops in the past week's information.

I also got curious about ownership, but near as I can tell, I'm not going to learn much.  That's because most of these stations belong to something called the Citizen Weather Observer Program, or CWOP.  This is a public-private partnership, that is, private individuals (or perhaps organisations such as businesses, schools, or non-profits) provide information, and a public agency, the Weather Service, publishes it.  Since I have no idea how much longer I'll have to do without the NOAA station at UW, I have an interest in not upsetting the privacy of the citizens who provide that information.

So what I provide below is location in terms of the nearest intersection of collector or larger streets.  Also what each site records, but the default is temperature, humidity and wind at quarter-hour intervals, with no swoops.  One site doesn't do wind; many report more often than quarter hours; none have swoops.

Weather stations in North Seattle

N130th Seattle

This station is owned by the Washington Department of Transportation and is near the intersection of 5th Ave NE and Roosevelt Way NE, actually near or on I-5.  It records the default plus road temperature.

K7SSW Seattle

A CWOP station well west of Greenwood Ave N and N 125th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation.

DW8513 Seattle

A CWOP station near 15th Ave NW and NW 100th St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation.

EW6795 Seattle

A CWOP station near Sand Point Way NE and NE 95th St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation every five minutes.

CW3683 Seattle

A CWOP station north of Roosevelt Way NE and NE 92nd St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation every ten minutes.

FW0821 Seattle

A CWOP station north of Aurora Ave N and N 95th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every ten minutes.

FW8372 Seattle

A CWOP station near 15th Ave NW and Holman Road NW.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every five minutes.

CW6259 Seattle

A CWOP station south of Roosevelt Way NE and NE 92nd St.  It records the default plus pressure and precipitation every five minutes.

CW1943 Seattle

A CWOP station near 35th Ave NE and NE 65th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation.

EW9877 Seattle

A CWOP station near Sand Point Way NE and NE 65th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every ten minutes.

KG7QQL Seattle

A CWOP station near 32nd Ave NW and NW 65th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation every five minutes.

FW6603 Seattle

A CWOP station north of Meridian Ave N and N 50th St.  It records the default, minus wind, but plus pressure and precipitation, every five minutes.

N7TUG-8 Seattle

A CWOP station near NW Market St and NW 54th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation, at irregular intervals; my impression is that they vary between two and fifteen minutes.

GW1230 Seattle

A CWOP station near Aurora Ave N and N 40th St.  It records the default plus pressure, solar radiation and precipitation, every five minutes.

So who's right?

Let's look at two tables, dear Diary.  The first shows UW's lows and those of the nearest stations to the northeast (CW1943 Seattle), northwest (FW6603 Seattle), west (GW1230 Seattle) and south (GW1416 Seattle, near 24th Ave E and Boyer Ave E).  Anyway, let's look:

Date	UW	Northeast	Northwest	West	South	Boeing
10/26/2023	42	36	37	34	38	36
10/27/2023	38	33	33	36	36	30
10/28/2023	36	30	33	32	33	28
10/29/2023	37	32	34	35	34	27
10/30/2023	41	37	34	39	38	32
10/31/2023	40	35	35	37	38	30
11/01/2023	45	41	40	43	43	37

So will you look at that, dear Diary?  UW had the highest low for each day of that week among these sites, and Boeing Field had the lowest for six days out of seven.  Could they both be wrong?  Let's look at the other table before deciding. This one features stations  north (Seattle-Beacon Hill, AirNow), northwest (Seattle-Duwamish, AirNow, swooped today), west (FW7103 Seattle, CWOP) and southwest (FW7437 Seattle, CWOP) of the station I've been following for years.  So they cover less of the circle around Boeing Field; they're also considerably farther from the station at Boeing Field than the ones in the previous table are from UW's Atmospheric Sciences building.  But let's see what they say.

Date	Boeing	North	Northwest	West	Southwest	UW
10/26/2023	36	40	42	40	35	42
10/27/2023	30	37	38	36	33	38
10/28/2023	28	34	35	34	28	36
10/29/2023	27	35	35	34	31	37
10/30/2023	32	38	38	37	34	41
10/31/2023	30	39	39	39	33	40
11/01/2023	37	43	44	43	38	45

Well, hully gee!  Similar pattern!

What we know, dear Diary, is that while the federal sites have both long gotten colder readings than UW, this pattern of extreme differences between the UW, traditionally highest of the three I've long followed, and Boeing Field, traditionally in the middle, is relatively new.

And you know what, dear Diary?  I'm really tired today of fighting Blogspot every time I put a table in here.  So I've just uploaded the current state of my spreadsheet into Google Drive (134 KB .ods file).  The same dates as the past week last year were messed up by the complicated series of omissions I told you about when I told you, dear Diary, about the three sites I normally follow.  But the spreadsheet includes those dates for 2021, 2020 and 2019 as well, and while differences between UW and Boeing consistently rise during this season, in the past those rises were from 0 to 2 degrees to 3 or 4 degrees.  Not to 8 to 10 degrees.

So maybe there is a newly arising weather-related reason why Boeing Field should be so much colder at night than the UW.  But that hypothesis doesn't account for the fact that the area around Boeing Field, and that around the UW, seem to be much more similar in nightly lows than Boeing Field and the UW themselves.  So here are some other potential reasons:

• Could it be because of the quality control procedures the CWOP home page boasts about?  No, because two stations in the second table aren't CWOP stations.
• OK, so could it be because everyone except the UW and the FAA use the same brand of weather equipment?  Possible, but doesn't explain why this difference only appeared over the past month or two.  (Also, the FAA station at SeaTac Airport is between Boeing Field and UW too. [1])
• Could the UW and FAA have made an agreement that every user of either site should consult both and split the difference?  Maybe, but I'm a leftist, and we don't approve of conspiracy theories this decade.
• Could both the UW's and the FAA's thermometers have gone out of whack recently?  That's my notion.  But real meteorologists have programs that can agglomerate all the observations, not just those nearest the two subject sites, and then run real statistical analyses of those observations.  So my goal is just to point out that the difference exists, and let them work out what it is.

That accomplished, this page's title promised "weather information", not just "weather records".  Most people care more about the forecast than about the past; in fact, I started tracking low temperatures mainly as a tool to evaluate forecasts.  So what about those?

[1] Stupid me, I started this page thinking I track a NOAA site at SeaTac.  So the first version of the second table in this section was centred on SeaTac and included the actual FAA station there as one neighbouring my imagined NOAA station there.

Weather forecasts offered by NOAA

The Weather Service likes to present its forecasts as carefully numerically modulated, a smooth mathematical surface, so to speak; if I go to the Seattle office's page and hit "Forecasts", then "Local Area", what I get is a page that invites longitude and latitude numbers with many digits.  But I doubt very much that it has either the manpower or the computer power to present so very many reliable forecasts that take full account of topography, for example separate forecasts for the top and the bottom of Golden Gardens Park.  So my preference is to find forecasts that claim to be for a specific place rather than for some offset from a specific place, and do my own modulating.  However, the Weather Service is enough invested in its claim to have superpowers that it doesn't offer a list or map of the places it writes real forecasts for.  So the question is how to find them.

The most precise tool the Weather Service offers for finding its forecasts varies depending on the situation.  Specifically, then, Seattle is big enough to resemble a rural area with regard to precision, so the ZIP code is the best choice.   This map says we have nine ZIP codes in North Seattle.  The layout:

Northwest	North	Northeast
98177	98133	98125
98117	98103	98115
98107	98103 again	98105 and 98195

The east-west dividing lines appear to be around 100th St and mostly around 65th St (except where I live); the north-south ones appear to me to be by address, the way I used to divide up the parks, NW, N or NE.  Note, dear Diary, that 98133 continues north well into Shoreline, and 98177 continues north even beyond Shoreline.

Here, in numerical order, are the forecasts I get when I put the ZIP code into the search box at weather.gov:

• 98103 leads to "2 Miles W Seattle-University WA".
• 98105, 98115 and 98195 all lead to "Seattle-University WA".
• 98107 and 98117 both lead to "Seattle-Ballard WA".
• 98125 leads to "2 Miles ENE North Seattle WA".
• 98133 leads to "Shoreline WA".
• 98177 leads to "2 Miles WNW Shoreline WA".

For all these ZIP codes, the observation station, whose current readings are cited and to whose recent readings there's a link, is one in Lake Forest Park that doesn't do anything for about an hour each morning.  It's a CWOP station, so why don't they link instead to one of the better CWOP stations within North Seattle, at least for the southern North Seattle ZIP codes?

Anyway, I tried typing in those names, but didn't get good results.  So basically, dear Diary, the most reliable search term with which to get to a forecast for the U-District is 98105; for Ballard, 98107; for "North Seattle", turns out, Northacres Park.  (Or Green Lake.)  These three may be all the locations in North Seattle that get real forecasts, or there may be more; I don't know; but ZIP code searches and similar strategies are how I try to identify such locations in general.

All for tonight, dear Diary.  Now I'm going to go see if I can get myself to work any more today on Cowlitz County's population, and bid you happy nights and days until we meet again.