Scott Sistek 
Autumn leaves on a rainy day near Seattle.
The sun is back out in Seattle. Temperatures are ultra comfortable: Not too hot; not too warm. Just a little gray and fog in the morning and midday to keep that Seattle feel, but crystal blue skies as the mountains were…kinda out at least.
The forecast through much of the next week is more of the same:
So, let’s talk about… how close we are to autumn! Woo!
Aside from literally being close to astronomical autumn, which happens Tuesday evening, the numbers are starting to bear it out too.
For example:
** Saturday was just two months until Seattle reaches its statistical wettest day of the year! That’s just 61 days. Just 1464 hours. In seconds that’s ONLY….OK, so it’s still over 5.2 million seconds way…
November 19th it has rained 95 times in the past 131 years of data. No other date on the calendar has had rain so frequently in Seattle.
But if it feels like I was just writing about how it was the statistical driest day of the year in Seattle not too long ago — you’d be right. That was just 50 days ago on August 4th. Yep, it’s just 107 days from the driest day to the wettest day of the year. (OR just 9.2 million seconds!)
One of my favorite quirks of our climate that it takes months for Seattle coming out of spring to commit to summer, but just weeks for Seattle to commit to autumn.
** Saturday’s record high was ONLY 82 degrees. We just hit 77 on Thursday. That’s a good sign record highs are dropping quick, though Sept. 19 is a bit of an anomaly as the record highs in the days just before and after are still in the upper 80s if not low 90s.
Speaking of 90s…
** September 22 — JUST OVER 48 HOURS! (172,000+ seconds!) — is the latest day Seattle has ever hit 90. (I don’t think anyone will be sad to see the 90s go off the board.)
The latest 80 degree day is October 16th BUT! That should give sun fans hope that all is not lost in October. Just back in 2022, Seattle somehow hit 88 degrees on Oct. 16, beating the record high by 16 degrees. I remember that was brutal on the pumpkins, accelerating their spoilage. Oct. 1, 1987 even hit 89 degrees.
** Seattle is losing 0.3-0.4 degrees off its average high temperature — PER DAY! — this time of year.
** Seattle is also losing about 3 minutes of daylight per day. That’s a half hour every 10 days.
** Trees are starting to turn pretty colors 🙂
UMMM… THE SUN FANS ARE STARTING TO WISH THEY SKIPPED THIS BLOG…
OK, I can give sun fans some statistics too.
Sun fans have had 10,258 minutes of 80 degree weather in Seattle (that’s over 615,000 seconds!). That’s above average! And YES I actually counted. I count every year.
And we should indeed still see plenty of sun through at least Wednesday. That’s… well, it would take a while to factor out darkness and clouds but trust me, it’s a lot of seconds!