WeatherWatcher: Regular fall weather to return

N 195th St trail in the rain
Photo by Carl Dinse

Forecast: Our dry weather streak is about to end. We have one and a half more days of the foggy skies and dry conditions before a weak system moves through the area Tuesday afternoon and evening. The jet stream is reconfiguring into a fall weather pattern and is expected to remain stable once the change happens.

The jet stream has been pointed north into Alaska and has been relatively weak. This week the jet stream is expected to strengthen and shift south into the Pacific Northwest. All of the forecast models have pretty good confidence that this shift will happen and maintain for the next week or so.

After Tuesday afternoon, we are expecting cloudy skies, showers, with highs near 60 and lows in the 40's through the end of next weekend. A weak system bringing rain Tuesday night, a stronger system bringing steady rain Thursday, showers Friday-Saturday and a steady rain event Sunday.

Last week's weather, which broke records at Sea-Tac for high temperatures above 70°F back to back, was pretty much isolated to Sea-Tac. In Shoreline and Lake Forest Park, we remained in the mid-upper 60's in the warmer days. In general, however, we are still running slightly below normal in average temperature for October at my Northridge Station. We are dry, about one and a half inches of rain below the average at the moment for October, but we may catch up a bit over the last half of the month.

Here are the daily high and low temperatures for October so far:

A better view of the average temperature is in the daily average temperature graph which gives a clearer view of above or below average trends.

There's a bigger low dip near the beginning of the month, compared to the small warm dip last week. In the long term I'm expecting near normal or slightly below normal temperatures to continue through early December for Shoreline and Lake Forest Park. Sea-Tac, where official records are kept, may be a different story.

For current weather conditions you can visit www.ShorelineWeather.com.