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In 2016 I’m doing a 365 Nature project. Learn more about the project and see all the 365 Nature posts.


We are in the midst of a series of big storms here in the Pacific Northwest. We have had torrential rain since yesterday that has barely stopped. Fortunately, here in Seattle the wind has been minimal, but in other areas around Puget Sound, thousands are without power and trees are blowing over. Some areas have seen large hail. South in Oregon, tornadoes have been touching down and the west coast is seeing thunder and lightning. It’s been a wild couple of days and I’m grateful today was an in-service day at our outdoor forest preschool. It likely would have been cancelled anyway.

Today we are having fun staying dry and watching the weather blow through. Early it was pouring rain, but not windy. Then we had a brief break in the storms and to the west the sun came out through the clouds. But to the west at the same time, low, dark clouds darkened the sky. It’s an interesting dynamic to have one side of our house lit up by the sun, the other side as dark as night. Now the winds have picked up and the rain still comes. Today is just a small storm relative to what we’re expecting tomorrow. We still don’t know how big it will be, but the chances of a direct hit are getting greater each forecast that comes out.

It’s been fun watching the radar map and monitoring the forecasts to see how they change. That we can predict anything that is hundreds of miles away is amazing.

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Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner

Kelly Brenner is a naturalist, writer and artist based in Seattle. She is the author of THE NATURALIST AT HOME: Projects for Discovering the Hidden World Around Us and NATURE OBSCURA: A City’s Hidden Natural World from Mountaineers Books, a finalist for the Washington State Book Awards and Pacific Northwest Book Awards. She writes articles about natural history and has bylines in Crosscut, Popular Science, National Wildlife Magazine and others. On the side she writes fiction.

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