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Comment by irrational | Hacker News Reader

Interesting. I live on the West coast and I cannot remember the fall foliage ever being as spectacular as it has been this year. I was just wondering the other day why it was so much better than ever before.

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In the pnw it's because of a remarkable storm free October. The trees are progressing the same as always, but the leaves aren't getting knocked off. I think.

The storms are from the jet stream moving from north of Seattle, to south of the region. When the jet stream is directly above us, we get storms.

Summer is when the jet stream is to the north, and we get included in the band of warm air that California always enjoys. Winter is when it moves to the south, putting the Seattle area in the cold band that Alaska always endures.

The jet stream is late this year.

Do you mean West Coast USA? I'm in Oregon and I'll say that fall foliage has been nice the last few days, but we also didn't get much rain this summer, and the last few winters have been lacking in moisture as well. My parents tell me it used to rain and snow quite a lot more than it has been these last few decades.

I moved from the Seattle area to eastern Washington about ten years ago. When I first moved here, people said "oh, this isn't a normal winter." Summer came "Oh, this isn't a normal summer." Several more years went by, with some winters having no snow, others piled up to six feet. Some summers it was 100F for a month straight, others just a week. I finally came to the conclusion that there was no such thing as a normal year to my non-meteorologist experience, because the normal was spread over a decade or more. I've also come to the conclusion that there are a lot of micro-climates in the northwest, having observed that with mountains, water, prairie, rolling hills, etc all over the place the weather can change significantly within just a short drive.

You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard. 1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a colourful production. The foggy grey backdrop is now a blue sky. Rainfall numbers might not be very different, but the perpetual cloud that coloured scifi for a generation is gone.

So you're saying that Seacouver doesn't exist anymore?

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seacouver)

The real joke of 'seacouver' is the an old adage for filming TV in Canada: Film in Vancouver, but never admit so in the script. If you want to tap the US market (who doesn't?) then the story cannot ever be set outside the US. The few shows that did (The Crow series etc) died quick deaths. X-Men went out on a limb by repeatedly saying Wolverine lived in Canada (Rouge finds him there). That was a risk. Everyone assumed they would have put him in Alaska. X-Files set a short arc on a train heading to Vancouver, but even there the bad guys were Japanese. None of the main story could ever happen in Canada.

Sell also Scrubs, filmed in LA but set in "San Frangeles" although never admitted in the script. They wanted to avoid the LA/SF/NY trend of mentioning place names and expecting the whole world to know what you are talking about. For the longest time I thought scrubs was set in Florida.

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