This happened during a fucking El Nino and those are the death of snow usually. El Ninos bring death ridges and/or split flow hell which is usually an 🤮🤮🤮 pattern spelling the end of winter before it even starts. Some El Nino's like 2002 will have a mini cold spell at the beginning to fool you like October 2002 or 2019-2020.
My lowest low for Oregon is still October's 2019's low of 21F I've yet to exceed lower then that. I wonder if I ever will?
Here's a special article about the 69 snowstorm: http://special.registerguard.com/csp/cms/sites/web/news/5675242-35/story.csp
The Big Snow It came without warning and left the city under a record-setting blanket of white
I agree. 1969 was a weak El Nino that year but something went completely off the rails not delivering the usual moderate droughts.
I don't know that much about Oregon weather, i do live on another coast and can see daily how much water affects temperature, though.
Also, I am no meteorologist or by any means a weather expert. My limited knowledge of weather concepts come from sailing and from studying fluid dynamics from a civil engineering perspective.
Consider the ways that weather or tidal flow or even water flowing in a pipe or ditch work... at the highest level all it is based on several key generalizations estimating behavior even in a pipe. Now, expand this to something simple like storm water runoff and the generalized approximations grow massively (but still serve the purpose for our ends), now expand this to attempting to model a bay or tidal basin (which is the actual lifetime project of a mentor of mine for both storm management and fisheries development), the assumptions and approximations one must make are huge and can pretty much only show what "usually happens" in a particular situation.
Ok, when that is expanded to the entire world's weather, my point is the presumptions and generalizations are massively large. And "freak" events happen. At best people can make educated guesses as to the cause and maybe be able to predict some (which predictions are usually based on noting similarities to past freak events.)
Anyway, I hope you like cold weather as much as I do and will welcome the arctic blast that will hit us about Dec. 20 when the hot weather now is supposed to "flip".