WeatherWatcher: Saturday night wind, very slight chance of some snow flakes

Marginal snow in Shoreline
Photo by Carl Dinse

Saturday night wind: We had a forecast for a breezy Saturday night, but it turned into a typical fall windstorm. Amazingly there were not very many power outages with the wind. We saw wind gusts at Richmond Beach to 37mph around 11:30pm Saturday night. A station in Kenmore right on the lake recorded a wind gust of 47mph. Rainfall was not nearly as much as forecasted either; at most we received 0.05 inches of rain.

Forecast: A lot of talk about snow has been in many forecasts for the past 3-4 days. Bottom line, I don't think we are going to see any accumulations within the next 5 days. There is a strong low pressure system moving inland to our south. The low pressure system is expected to make landfall around southern Oregon or Northern California. This is several hundred miles too far south to really produce any snowfall in our area. Cold air also isn't quite cold enough in Canada yet to put us in a good freeze. Both are ingredients typically required to generate a good lowland snow event here.

What is expected for Shoreline and Lake Forest Park is a couple of hit or miss rain showers Monday. Colder air is flowing into the area from Canada, so Monday night temperatures are expected to start dropping. As the cold air moves in, the moisture moves south. There is a very narrow window around 3-7am with a slight chance of a shower, and with it maybe some snow flakes mixed in. We might see a dusting on lawns before it quickly melts away, but it is much more likely we will just have some cold, light, rain showers.

We dry out Tuesday afternoon and into the holiday weekend. Sunny skies and clear cold nights are expected, with lows in the 20's and highs in the upper 30's or near 40°F. Thanksgiving Day is expected to be our coldest day with a high temperature near 37°F.

The next threat of activity is Sunday, where we might see rain showers start as a rain/snow mix. At this time that's too far in the future for weather forecasting and there is no real certainty to the forecast for Sunday yet. I will provide updates if anything changes.

For current weather conditions visit www.shorelineweather.com