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Seattle weather history10/2/2023 ![]() There’s an eight-year gap in official Seattle snowfall record-keeping that started in 1996. Freezing weather, and occasional flurries, persisted through Christmas Day. On December 18, 1990, what Shaw calls “the mother of all convergence zones” graced the city and its surrounds with a thunderstorm and seven inches of snow (by the time the storm got to Sea-Tac it had dwindled significantly). What’s rarer than snow in Western Washington? A bona fide White Christmas. “January 1969 won’t replace January 1950 in the winter record books,” wrote Mary Elayne Dunphy for The Seattle Times, “but it will get a place next to it.” December 1990 It brought out the worst in one Seattleite, who stole a set of chains right off another man’s tires, and the best in transit system employees, who worked 12-hour shifts building chains for area buses. It was a harbinger of the month to come: Just nine January days went without snow at Sea-Tac, and depth stayed at an inch or more for 23 of them. New Year’s Eve of 1968 set a 24-hour snowfall record in Seattle proper, per The Seattle Times, with 10 inches falling downtown. “But the only thing is, I don’t know any more about what buses are running than they do.” January 1968: Big Snow “They got their problems, and they’re as cold as I am,” a rosy-cheeked transit system worker told The Seattle Daily Times that winter. Locals turned out for the historic storm in true Seattle fashion: skiing at parks and golf courses, taking snow-capped skyline photos, and complaining to long-suffering bus drivers. In the modern era, Shaw says, “nothing comes close.” That month, 57.2 inches fell and not a single day went by without snow on the ground. January 13 “was a hands-in-the-pockets, hat-over-the-ears, turned-up-collar and rolled-up cuffs kind of night,” Lenny Anderson wrote for The Seattle Daily Times, “one which will be harked back to for many years to come.” The 20-inch onslaught holds the Sea-Tac record for the most snowfall in a single calendar day. “There's no telling the depth of snow a few hours ahead,” The Seattle Post-Intelligencer remarked, an early example of Seattle’s tough-to-predict weather patterns. “Ice and snow are of rare occurrence and almost unknown in Western Washington,” reported territory governor Elisha Ferry-just before the region received over five feet of snow in 11 days, according to Paul Dorpat for HistoryLink. Say one good word about the Pacific Northwest’s mild weather and prepare for a walloping. These are some of the storms Seattle will never forget. “We’re all kind of in this snow globe together.” “You could probably go as far as to say we’re one of the most snow-enthusiastic cities,” Shaw says. And whether it’s the novelty, or the unnavigable hills, or the magic of all those snow-capped evergreen trees, we’ll never stop freaking out about them. But we do get knock-down, drag-out, buy-out-the-PCC snowstorms: Snowpocalypse, Storm King, the kind people remember decades after the fact.
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