WeatherWatcher: First real windstorm of the season

City Light outage map at 10pm
City Light in total has 46,000 households without power

The high wind watch was upgraded to a high wind advisory by the National Weather Service in Seattle Friday morning. That advisory should have been a high wind warning after the storm hit.

Winds of 20-35mph were expected with gusts to 45mph. In actuality, we had winds of 25-40mph with gusts to 60mph throughout the entire area between Seattle and Everett. Easily strong enough to meet high wind warning criteria.

The Richmond Beach station lost power during the second half of the storm. Before it went offline, the peak wind gust at 6:23pm was 42.6mph. This is proving to be a very successful weather station for Shoreline. Central Market saw a gust of 34mph, a personal weather station near Parkwood saw 38mph. The Edmonds - Kingston Ferry recorded a wind gust of 60mph, as did both floating bridges on Lake Washington.

All the weather stations I could find that didn't lose power during this storm generally reached between 58 and 62mph around the region north and south of Shoreline and Lake Forest Park. I think it's safe to assume we had winds just as strong as well.

Here's the current dashboard and graph from the Richmond Beach Station, last updated at 7:40pm (power went out a few minutes afterwards.)

Richmond Beach Station

Even the Northridge station, surrounded by mature Douglas fir trees, recorded a gust of 21mph at 6pm shortly before losing internet connection. Far as I can tell we still have power and battery backup on the Northridge station so when internet comes back we'll get to see how windy it got there.

North Ridge (Echo Lake Neighborhood) Station

Temperatures are another story as well, but I'll have to talk about that in my next weather report when we get data back from the local stations. We started the wind storm with temperatures 54-55 degrees. By the time the wind storm was over we dropped down to the low 40's.

One of the biggest challenges tonight with finding storm data is that many of the weather stations in Shoreline and throughout the region in general lost power and/or internet during the height of the storm. The National Weather Service office in Seattle also lost power. The Portland, Oregon National Weather Service office had to take over operations for the evening for the Seattle office until power is restored.

I'll have the forecast and full data report out Sunday morning. For current conditions and information you can visit www.shorelineweather.com.