The WA State Climate Office, led by CICOES Researchers Nick Bond and Karin Bumbaco, is featured in Crosscut’s “4 PNW weather bloggers you should read.”

By Hannah Weinberger

The newsletter: Office of the Washington State Climatologist Report and Outlook

The author: Dr. Nick Bond and Karin Bumbaco

Writing monthly since: 2007 (with Bond taking the lead in 2010)

Newsletter focus: To provide analysis and data to people who rely on climate knowledge for their work but don’t want to yawn their ways through reading, and to raise public awareness of climate matters.

Favorite Pacific Northwest atmospheric event or fact: Bond is fascinated by the asymmetry of season lengths in the Pacific Northwest. While it takes months for spring to warm up into summer, fall gets shortchanged. “In basically October, we go from summer to winter.”

The lowdown: You might not think to reach for official analytical weather documents in your free time, but State Climatologist Bond has worked for a decade to make sure there’s something in his monthly climate report for everyone. When Bond took over the Office of the Washington State Climatologist Report and Outlook in the spring of 2010, he went about adding sections that make the report less of “a slog.” It’s one of his favorite parts of his job.

Each roughly nine-page edition features things like a long description of what happened with the climate over the past month, a summary, the next month’s forecast and a drought monitor update. It also has more accessible sections that relate climate to everyday living or take longer-view looks at trends — discussing when tomatoes might ripen, exploring the state’s diverse climates, spotlighting people in the climate community.

“When I took on the state climate office job, I thought that I’d be serving state agencies largely, and that we would be providing them climate data and expertise — and there would be a line going out the door and around the block of people coming to seek our help. But that was not the case,” he says.

In addition to utility managers; people with the Departments of Health, Ecology or Fish and Wildlife; or university academics, “a big fraction of our audience is what we’d call enthusiasts,” he says. These are folks interested in the weather and climate and how they relate to things like agriculture, hydropower, freshwater ecosystems and more.

But the newsletter’s bread and butter is climate, not weather. Weather is the local atmospheric conditions you’re experiencing right now or in the short-term; climate is cumulative trends in local conditions over time. “We’re not trying to keep people out of harm’s way. Our role is on a longer time scale, and a monthly interval makes sense for that,” Bond says.

Writing the newsletter has challenged Bond to put readers first. “In science writing, it is so easy to slip into very turgid prose with endless strings of adjectives, lots of detail and jargon and so forth. I wanted to make the newsletter a pleasure to read rather than work to read. And in doing that, I’m trying to keep things not simple, but understandable,” he says. “And a little bit of humor makes the medicine go down. … Chances are, then, your ideas will be that much better accepted.”

Bond’s newsletter writing has also spurred research. The first mention in writing of The Blob ⁠— a now famous term Bond coined ⁠for a patch of hot water that formed in the Gulf of Alaska in 2013— was in this newsletter, and researching some newsletter highlights sparked full-on journal articles.

The newsletter is not a one-man show: Asst. State Climatologist Karin Bumbaco, who had been at the office a year and half before Bond joined her, provides writing and editing. She has a strong sense of what’s interesting or accessible, Bond says, and is “essential” for flagging whether ideas are too inside baseball. A recent University of Washington graduate student has also been writing recap sections on temperature, precipitation and more over the past few months. “He’s earning his pay, definitely,” Bond says.