WeatherWatcher: Christmas Day storm signals end of dry spell

December 26th 2011, 4:00 pm. Included today:

• Christmas Day wind event
• End of our December dry spell
• Next week's outlook
• Weekly weather data

Highlights:

• Christmas Day, December 25th: We had a strong frontal system move through. The national weather service may have been on vacation, and didn't realize they needed to issue a wind advisory until it was already here.

A wind advisory was issued at 11:53 AM, Christmas day, right at about the peak of the wind event. The strongest gusts recorded in Shoreline were at the Central Market station and at the Shorecrest High School station, both recording a peak wind gust of 37mph. 

Home Education Exchange center (formally known as the North City ES weather station) was down due to the power outage during the storm. Most of the north half of Shoreline was without power Christmas Day. Power in the North Ridge/Echo Lake neighborhood went out at 11:54 AM, and was restored around 3:00PM, with the exception of more localized areas. My weather station located in North Ridge was also without power. Backup batteries allowed for data collection until about 1PM, before those went dead. Other area wind gusts recorded outside of Shoreline were between 50-60mph, mostly Downtown Seattle and south.

• Christmas day wind/rain signals the end of our dry spell, as I previously discussed in my ENSO status and outlook (see previous article)

• Next week's outlook:

We will be bombarded by a series of storms, almost a storm a day for the next 5-10 days. Several wind events are likely similar to the one on Christmas Day. National Weather Service has in fact already issued a wind advisory for the northwest interior for tonight through Tuesday morning, Edmonds is under that advisory, however Shoreline and Lake Forest Park are not. Given that we are on the border of that advisory, I suspect we will see possible damaging winds again tonight, especially on exposed bluffs along the shorelines, especially the Richmond Beach area.

Weather data for December 17th - 23rd:

• High temperature: 48.7°F (Saturday)
• Low temperature: 26.4°F (Thursday)
• Rainiest day: 0.16 inches (Sunday)
• Total rainfall: 0.20 inches
• Warmest day: 42.4°F (Friday)
• Coldest day: 32.8°F (Thursday)
• Average temperature: 39.3°F

Warmest and coldest days are based on average temperature of the entire day, starting at midnight. All other averages are based on the whole week. All weather data unless otherwise noted is sourced from Carl's Shoreline Weather Station.

Twitter: SWeatherWatcher