Kenmore Undressed

Isn’t it Cold in the Seattle Area? You’re so far North!

Isn’t it cold in Seattle? We were asked this a lot in Italy. My realtives had a hard time believing that the weather in Seattle is temperate and relatively mild. Because we lie so far north, even most people in the United States think of Seattle as a cold place like Maine or Upstate NY. The fact is, the weather in Puget Sound is unique. Even though Seattle is further north than all other major US cities, we have an oceanic climate. As a realtor, I’ve worked with a lot of relocation clients and it’s always fun to see their faces when I mention that Seattle is a place where the grass is brown in the summer and green in the winter. We are famous for the rain, but most people don’t realize that we have virtually no rain from mid-July to late September. 

Some of my friends told me that last month wasn’t a typical August and, since we were in Italy, I wanted to check back to see what happened. Well, I did some poking around and found a wonderful website called Beautiful Seattle that offers a huge amount of information about Seattle. One section of the site deals specifically with our climate. Below are several pages from the site. Just click on them if you want to visit the site:

 

In the top left of the site, click on the “select destination” menu which will take you to a whole array of topics. If you select climate you get this page:

From here you can select any number of reports regarding the weather in Seattle. So, for those of you who lived through the August weather and those who don’t live in the area, here’s what happened:

This is a very nice chart as it gives me a good idea of what the weather was like last month. It was a fairly cloudy August (unusual) and the temperatures were fairly mixed. Mid-month got really hot. I will tell you that Italy was downright brutal: mid to upper 90’s, sunny and humid. One similarity to Seattle is that most Italians don’t have air conditioning……………………..ouch!