Serious Weather

During major weather events like this, everything seems to happen at once.  Consider the Saturday AM National Service warming map for our region (see below).   We have flood warnings, gale warnings, flood watches, winter storm watch (snow), small craft advisories, and more!

The rain totals over the last 24 hr (ending 7AM Saturday) have been substantial, with some mountain locations getting over 4 inches (see map below which shows locations that received over 1.5 inches)

Yesterday afternoon an extraordinary Puget Sound Convergence Zone set up around Everett (see radar image below fro 1:13 PM), with intense rain brings .5 to 1.2 inches in an hour to some locations in the lowlands.  As described in previous blogs, the Puget Sound CZ is the result of air converging on the leeside of the Olympics.

A number of major western WA rivers are surging now towards flood stage, as illustrated by the Snoqualmie near Carnation (below).  And water worries for Seattle are rapidly disappearing as the Chester Morse and Tolt reservoirs go into rapid refill mode.

And there were strong winds with this event (see map of wind gusts over the past 24 h).  Note particularly strong westerly winds on the eastern slopes of the Cascades as the flow accelerated down the lee slopes of the Cascades.   Winds were gusting to 60-80 mph on exposed peaks in the Cascades.

The next surge of rain is moving in now, something well illustrated by the latest (7:15 AM) radar image

There is plenty for precipitation to come, as shown by the UW WRF forecast for the 72h period starting 5 AM this morning.   You will notice the huge contrasts between the rain shadow region east of the Olympics, mountains of Vancouver Is, and Cascades and the windward sides of the barriers.

And there will be be the high-country snow....but that will be tomorrow's story....