"The Rocky Mountains have received their first big snowfalls of the season, weeks ahead of schedule.
Since Monday, October 11 parts of Montana, Idaho, Wyoming and Utah have received well over 2 feet of early-season snow, with higher elevations receiving much, much more.
Likewise in Colorado, a widespread blast of cold and snow hit this week, with reports of over a foot of powder in the high country.
Jen Brill, co-owner of Silverton Mountain Ski Area, said the town of Silverton received about a foot, while the hills received about double that.
Silverton’s opening day is currently planned for Dec 30; however, “If it keeps up like this we’re always willing to open up early,” said Brill.
One Colorado ski area is opening this weekend after 14 inches hit its slopes. In a recent Facebook post, Wolf Creek confirmed that its beginner ‘Nova Lift’ would be open on October 16 and 17, weeks earlier than normal.
Headed east, South Dakota also experienced its first major snowfall of the season.
A whopping 27 inches fell in parts of the Black Hills, according to the National Weather Service.
Residents of Rapid City reported just over three inches.
While just outside Rapid City, areas received up to nine inches of snow.
North of the Black Hills, Spearfish saw accumulations of 15 inches throughout the city near the Wyoming border.
This week, the Seattle region is experiencing some of its coldest early-fall days in over 125 years.
According to the National Weather Service, Tuesday’s average temperature of 43F marked the coldest day Seattle has ever seen during the first two weeks of October
— the previous record was the 43.5F set on Oct 14, 1899
(the Centennial Minimum).
And when the city dipped to 36F early Tuesday morning, that was also the coldest October low in nearly two decades.
Furthermore, Pullman suffered its coldest Oct 13 on record yesterday: a low of 43F beat out the 44F from 1969.
Seattle’s early-season chill marks the latest in a series of extreme weather events in the Puget Sound region in 2021, reports mynorthwest.com:
Back on Feb 13, 8.9 inches of snow fell across the region
— the snowiest day Seattle had seen in any month in 52 years, and the most it had seen on a February day in almost a century.
Additionally, between Feb 12 and Feb 13, the city also saw the most snow over a two-day period in 49 years.
In early June, widespread thunderstorms drenched the Puget Sound region, breaking a number of rainfall records.
Then three weeks later, a heat wave broke records across Western Washington, with high temperatures everywhere from Bellingham down to Olympia.
And now, the region (as well as the entire western half of the U.S.) is suffering a stark return to the cold
— this reality, far from supporting the baseless AGW theory, actually serves as evidence of the swings between extremes we see during bouts historically low solar activity–due to the loss of energy in the jet streams:
The sun is currently experiencing its lowest output in more than a century (an irrefutable fact btw), and projecting forward,
a number of climate scientists and astrophysicists have long-suggested that the next cycle (26) will be weaker still, perhaps even non-existence,
akin to those during the Maunder Minimum (1645-1715), which in turn will usher in the next Grand Solar Minimum"