With continuing neutral ENSO conditions, the Office of the Washington State Climatologist reported today that Washington may be in for a warmer-than-normal summer and early fall. We might see above-normal precipitation later in the fall. Read more at their website. 

When you visit the Charles L. Pack Experimental Forest, you are not just taking a walk through a forest, you’re seeing sustainability in action. Through spacing trials, selection thinning, fertilizer treatments, and ecosystem-value services research, the Center of Sustainable Forestry demonstrates that sustainability and active forest management are not mutually exclusive. Read this exploration of the many faces of Pack Forest in this TimberWest Magazine story. 

It is not unusual for swarms of small earthquakes to precede a volcanic eruption. They can reach a point of such rapid succession that they create a signal called harmonic tremor that resembles sound made by various types of musical instruments, though at frequencies much lower than humans can hear. A new analysis, co-authored by ESS PhD student Alicia Hotovec-Ellis, of an eruption sequence at Alaska’s Redoubt Volcano in March 2009 shows that the harmonic tremor glided to substantially higher frequencies and then stopped abruptly just before six of the eruptions, five of them coming in succession.