The ocean is WARM

A 2005 satellite image of Cascadia.  We live in a landscape that is wedded to the ocean.

I've got a backlog of posts on my to-do list, but not a lot of time these days.  So this one will be short and to the point.  The ocean lapping Washington's coast is warm again...like possibly record-setting warm.   One of the longer ocean temperature records that I am able to access in its entirety is from NOAA's Cape Elizabeth buoy, which sits about 40 miles off of Taholah.  There are a couple of ways to visualize these data, but I like this approach, where the daily average temperature observations are laid over each other by year:

Daily average temperature dating back to 1987 from NOAA's Cape Elizabeth buoy.  This year's data are bolded in green.

This is a nice way to get a sense for the usual range of variability in temperature at this site across the entire record.  The data from this year aren't complete in this plot (that may be a problem with my download script - haven't checked) but the most recent summer data are there, and are shown with the bold green line.  The period right around the 200th day of the year (19 July this year) appears to be a record.  Its gotten a bit cooler since then, but we are still definitely on the upper end of the range of variability at this site.  Its warm.

By the way, I'm assuming that odd spike in the red line around the 270th day of the year is spurious...haven't checked that out yet...but based on how it looks compared to the rest of the record I don't think it is real.

The Cape Elizabeth buoy is some distance off-shore.  Is this warmth evident closer to the coast?  It appears so.  Here are temperature data form the tide gauge in La Push.  While this is a much shorter record, dating back to only 2005, it also appears as if some new temperature records were set at La Push in the middle of July:

Daily average temperature dating back to 2005 from NOAA's tide gauge in La Push, Washington.  This year's data are bolded in blue.

Again, I'm assuming that weird spike in yellow from around the 120th day of 2007 is spurious.

This does appear to possibly be something not affecting the inland sea.  Here is the same plot from Friday Harbor:

Daily average temperature dating back to 1992 from NOAA's tide gauge in Friday Harbor.  This year's data are bolded in red.

It is warm...the most recent observations from Friday Harbor are almost 14C, or almost 57F (yes, that is warm for the inland sea)...but nowhere near the record highs set in the summer of 1997 (the light blue line in the plot above).