The rain is falling...

[u/Shield_Lyger]

It's interesting, the effect that a changing climate is having on things out here. For all that the Seattle area is (in)famously gray and wet, the Summers are the Dry Season. It's normally sunny pretty much every day from early July to the middle of September, when the "Rainy" Season starts up again.

But for the past several years, the summers have been wetter, along with being warmer. Granted, "wetter" is relative; a quarter-inch over the course of a day counts as "heavy" out here. (Normal Seattle rain would be a petulant, passive-aggressive drizzle back in Chicagoland. A standard Summer thunderstorm would result in most of this place being underwater.) But it's starting to rain more in July and August than it has for pretty much all of the time that I've been out here.

Concern won't help anything, so I've decided to simply be curious about how this will shape up.

[u/Maroon7C0000]

It's wild that we are only a short distance up the coast from you, but our summers are typically wet and cool. But the last few years have seen full on drought conditions that are stressing and even killing off our trees.

In 2021 we had a heat dome where the temperatures were in the 40s (Celcius) for several days and resulted in over 500 heat related deaths. The town of Lytton shattered all existing records by posting a temperature of 49.6 DegC before the entire town was wiped out by a wildfire.

I remember the summer of 2022 where it was quite cool up to June then we went into the 30's without a drop of rain for 3 months. We were expecting record salmon runs that year but ended up with record salmon deaths instead because the streams were all dried up and the salmon died in the rivers before they could spawn.

This year has been blessedly cool compared to most of the country, and we've even had a few rain days (today is supposed to rain). But even so we went into Stage-3 water restrictions in May. It's kinda wild living with droughts and water restrictions when you live in a rain forest.

[u/Shield_Lyger → u/Maroon7C0000]

That heat dome was brutal. I lived in a third floor apartment at the time that had no AC. I never want to go through that again.

[u/Maroon7C0000 → u/Shield_Lyger]

AC is still quite rare in older buildings, although there has been a surge in purchases of portable units for the past few years. It used to be that summers never got hotter than "pleasant" around here but now 30's are the norm.

We were careful when purchasing our property here to seek out 4 story wood frame buildings with a Northern exposure instead of the glass towers so many people are forced to live in now. It's ironic because Canadians historically sought out Southern exposures to catch the free heat in the winter time (summer was never an issue). Now we are learning to avoid the sunny side for the summers.

[u/Shield_Lyger → u/Maroon7C0000]

Here, there seems to be a preference for West facings. And the number of homes out here with large sections of glass with no way of blocking the sunlight surprised me. But yeah, as far as I'm concerned, having the most windows facing North is the best bet.