Currently in Seattle — September 27, 2023: Duck weather

The weather, currently.

Rain and cloud cover will be with us most of Wednesday, though the thunderstorms and gusts are behind us. With a 90 percent chance of rain and a half-an-inch of rain coming down, you will definitely want rain gear for school and work commutes. Temps are topping out at 50 degrees, so things are cooling off, too.

Between the trees around town starting to show off autumn hues and the reappearance of puddles for splashing, I am feeling fall in a big way. Hot cider, a cozy blanket, and a book are everything after a rainy day run.

— Loren Drummond

What you need to know, currently.

With drought affecting broad swaths of the Mississippi River valley, river levels have dropped so low that saltwater from the Gulf of Mexico is creeping upriver in the Mississippi itself. At its current rate of progression, the Mississippi will turn too salty for water treatment plants at New Orleans to produce drinking water in just a few weeks.

Since saltwater is more dense than freshwater, the saltwater is actually moving upriver along the riverbed — within the river itself. Federal engineers that maintain the river channel have built a partial dam designed to slow the saltwater’s upstream progression, and increasingly extreme measures will need to be taken once the saltwater reaches New Orleans — like transporting freshwater by barge, and hastily building a water pipeline to the city.

Similar events happened in 1988, 1999, 2012, and again last year — but this one seems especially severe.

As global warming melts ice worldwide, sea level rise will make problems like this worse not just for Louisiana, but all coastal cities worldwide.

— Eric Holthaus

What you can do, currently.

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