If you follow weather in the Pacific Northwest, chances are you’ve heard of Cliff Mass. A professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington, Mass is one of the best-known and well-respected meteorologists in the region. A recent talk at the UW drew a full crowd, and Mass’ blog is followed closely by weather aficionados.

Mass’ new book, “The Weather of the Pacific Northwest,” offers a comprehensive but accessible look at the region’s varied and dramatic weather. We caught up with Mass while he was signing books at the University Book Store in Seattle and learned about why it’s so hard to predict Northwest weather and what he considers the perfect storm.

What prompted you to write the book and what do you hope boaters get out of it?
The book was written as an accessible introduction to Northwest weather, one that’s good for the layperson, yet one that’s technically accurate and comprehensive. I wanted a book that even meteorologists could enjoy and that was of interest to the pilots and the boaters and the hikers and everybody in between.

What made you get into weather?
I always enjoyed weather, from a really young age. A lot of people in my department are that way, just very excited about weather. There’s a class of us like that. Then there’s a class of the meteorologists who are very intrigued with the mathematics of the whole thing, and the fact that equations can describe a whole system. And of course weather has a lot of implications for society today, form global warming to weather forecasting. So that’s another motivation.

Where did you grow up?
Long Island. You can probably tell from the accent.

If someone were going to come here and charter a boat, what would you tell them to expect in terms of Northwest weather?
During the summertime, the big thing is the diurnal (daily) wind circulations, the Sound breeze, the flow through the Strait of Juan de Fuca, the sea breeze along the coast. But during the winter and the tail seasons, we get other things. We get the big storms. We get the gap winds through the Strait of Juan de Fuca. That’s when we get the real super-active weather.

Possibly the scariest part in the book for me was the 1979 storm that took out the Hood Canal Bridge. I think you said the winds were forecast for around the 40 mile per hour range or somewhere around there, and they topped 100 (mph).
That one was a big surprise. We knew there was a storm coming in and we expected winds of 40, 50 miles per hour, something like that. But in a localized area there were winds of 90, 100, 110 miles per hour, and that was due to a phenomena that we didn’t really understand at the time, and that’s this low that forms in the lee of the Olympics [Mountains].

What lessons do you think mariners ought to take from that incident?
A generalized lesson is the localized nature of the winds around here and how winds can be radically different 10, 20 miles away. But one thing mariners can have some comfort in is that the weather forecasting has gotten better and we’ve slowly gained an understanding of many of these local weather phenomena. So we’re a lot better off than we were 20, 30 years ago.

What do you think is the most interesting marine weather phenomenon we experience in the Northwest?
One that I’m studying right now is called the westerly wind surges, where winds can accelerate down the Strait of Juan de Fuca, producing winds of 70, 90 miles per hour on the eastern side of the Strait. That event destroyed the Ivar’s seafood restaurant in Mukilteo Landing several years ago. That’s an example of a kind of fascinating event, and one that can be extraordinarily energetic.

Is that hard to forecast?
Well, we’re getting better at it. Our computer models now are able to simulate a lot of these features, and in fact it did forecast that particular one.

What makes the Juan de Fuca such a fickle place? Some days it can be horrendous strait to cross and other days it can be a millpond.
It’s a gap in the mountains, and if you get a big difference in pressure across it, for whatever reason, then you can get these very strong winds. During the summer you can get strong winds there almost every day, and small craft warnings. The Strait is a very active place.

A lot of boaters live by the NOAA forecasts, and there’s a lot of frustration among boaters that they didn’t get it right. What makes it so difficult to get really accurate marine weather forecasts?
Everything is very, very localized. You really have to think about each area independently. The weather service tries to do that, but sometimes they don’t have enough time to give these details.

Why do we get such localized weather phenomena here?
It’s because we have mountains and water. We have all these mountain ranges and features, and that produces these very localized weather effects. And also, the land/water contrast. So we have these two things that are forcing local weather features.

If you were to compare the maritime area here with other parts of the country, like Florida and Los Angeles or Long Island, is it more difficult to forecast here than in other places?
We have much more active weather, which makes it more difficult. In Florida they worry about sea breezes, maybe, or thunderstorms. But they have no mountains there, and the mountains produce all these very substantial changes and these extreme conditions, so that makes it more difficult here.

So we can take pride as boaters that we’re a little more hardcore when it comes to weather?
Right. Especially during the wintertime, because we not only have the mountains, but the weather systems are much stronger here than what hits California or Florida. That alone is an issue for boaters, and then (the weather systems) interact with the mountains, producing all these very active local features.

What is the future of marine weather forecasting in this area?
The computer models are getting better and we’re getting more observations over the oceans, which is going to help a lot. I think the resolution will get finer and finer, so we’ll really define these bodies of water better. Right now the computer models have relatively coarse descriptions of things like the Strait of Juan de Fuca, but in five years it’s going to be much, much better. The water boundaries will be much better defined in our computer models.

What’s the likely effect of global warming on the marine weather phenomena around here?
Probably not very much for the next several decades. The water’s actually going to slow down global warming for us. The polar regions heat up more rapidly than the rest of the planet, and the continents heat up more rapidly than the oceans. The eastern oceans heat up more slowly than the western oceans, and we’re downstream from an eastern ocean. We’re going to be buffered by the ocean for quite a while.

What does the perfect storm look like in this area, and where are you going to be when it hits?
The perfect storm probably has existed already. It’s the Columbus Day storm of 1962. That was the greatest mid-latitude cyclone to hit not only here, but any place in the continental United States in the last 100 years. That storm, if it hit now, would probably cause tens of billions of dollars of damage. We’re talking about winds along the coast that were over 150 miles an hour in some places, over 100 miles per hour in Puget Sound and the Willamette Valley. That storm was the perfect storm. That’s probably a once-in-a-hundred-years storm.

If it happens again, what would you do personally?
That would be an extremely dangerous storm. I’d stay inside. And I wouldn’t be on a boat (laughs).

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