WeatherWatcher: Active weather ahead with rain, wind, then uncertainty

 

Blustery day at Richmond Beach
Photo by Carl Dinse

We have a week of active weather in the forecast. A rainstorm moves in late Monday morning, lasting through the afternoon and evening. A windstorm follows that rain Monday evening into Tuesday. A half inch to one inch of rain is expected with the Monday night storm.

Winds Monday night and Tuesday through the afternoon are expected to be south to southwest 15-30 mph, with gusts up to 45mph especially after midnight Monday night. Winds are expected to taper off after midnight Tuesday night into Wednesday. These winds could cause some scattered power outages throughout the area.

Interesting note, the Monday/Tuesday storm has prompted the National Weather Service in Seattle to issue their first blizzard warning for the Cascade and Olympic Mountains in 12 years. 

Rain continues through Wednesday into Thursday morning. Thursday morning and beyond is when things get very uncertain. Many of the forecast models believe we will transition into an arctic outbreak, except for the American GFS model. 

I personally have had a hard time trusting the American model. For the past two years, it has not been very good at predicting more than a couple hours into the future, let alone a few days. 

That said, even on the other forecast models that are run with slightly different starting variables, have a significant disagreement on placement of where the arctic outbreak will occur over the greater Northwest (including Montana). 

Generally, several forecasts are calling for an arctic lobe or "polar vortex" to reach down the west coast and bring us very cold temperatures with snow from Thursday/Friday well through next weekend. Other models have that arctic lobe staying generally east of the Rocky Mountain range, leaving us with our usual maritime climate and lowland rain.

It is still too early to know for sure what might happen after Thursday, but cold and snow-like weather is not ruled out yet. I will do another update Tuesday night, when hopefully we will have better forecast model agreement.

For current weather conditions visit: www.shorelineweather.com