Oregon weather is notoriously erratic, going from sunny to cloudy and rainy at almost random intervals. The exact reason for Oregon’s mild and varying weather is not something that some people may think about.
“Worldwide, our average temperature is going up, and that has a huge effect on weather, because our weather is really about balancing all [this] heat as it moves around,” science teacher Gareth Engler said. “[We] already [have] what [is] called a Mediterranean climate… [we] have a cool, wet winter and then a warm, dry summer,” Engler said.
Albany and neighboring cities are in the Willamette Valley, a 150-mile stretch of land surrounded by mountains on three sides: the Cascades, Pacific Coast Range, and Calapooya Mountains.
“You have these weather patterns coming off the coast, bringing all this moisture, and they hit the coast range, which isn’t that high, but that buffers it a little bit,” Engler said, “Then we have the Cascades. As soon as [the moisture] hits those cascades, [the] stuff gets forced by the mountains up high where it cools and [makes] a lot of rain, on [the] western side of the Cascade Mountains.”
“I love Oregon weather and how dynamic it is,” science teacher Lucas Risinger said. “Oregon’s a huge state. It’s not rainy in Eastern Oregon; in Bend, it’s sunny most days of the year. So there is something about living in the valley that gives us that rainy season, but then [a] super dry summer.”
“The surface of the planet experiences uneven heating. There [are] more direct rays of light at the equator and less direct at the poles. And of course, we’re at about 45 degrees, so we’re halfway between those, and so that amount of solar radiation that we experience really varies quite a bit between the summer and the winter.” Risinger said.
“Water is a tremendous insulator,” Risinger said. “[There’s an] 100 degree difference between seasons [in Albany], [while there’s] only a 15 degree difference [in Newport],” Risinger said. “That’s because water has a high specific heat, [meaning] it traps energy in from the sun and it keeps it there, so it never gets too hot and never gets too cold. That’s a big difference between the coast and the valley.”
Risinger said, “You’ll notice that same effect, if you go out to the countryside, it’s usually cooler than it is in the city, that’s because there’s more water, whether that water is in [the] creeks, the trees, the grass, or people’s gardens, and far less black top and cement.”
