“When deciding whether to pop open the umbrella or shed an extra layer, Northwesterners trust Cliff Mass to provide answers. After all, the atmospheric scientist literally wrote the book on Northwest weather. His 2008 paperback, The Weather of the Pacific Northwest, covers the region’s broad meteorological landscape, from the Puget Sound convergence zone to the “banana belt” of Southern Oregon.
Mass’s intense interest in Northwest weather developed while he earned his PhD in atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington in 1978. After graduation, Mass briefly left the Northwest for a professorship in Maryland but was drawn back to Seattle, where he gained local celebrity status as a professor at the UW, a weekly guest on public radio, and as the host of the popular Cliff Mass Weather and Climate Blog.”