SkyWatch: Double whammy packs punch

It was really a one-two punch for much of southwest Washington this week. The pineapple express set up shop. This is when the Jet Stream carries warm, moist air from down near Hawaii and pumps it almost directly up to our area. That was punch number one.

And the rain totals were unbelievable, especially along the west side of the Washington Cascades, which drain into the I-5 corridor. There aren’t a ton of weather stations up there, but we’ve got several clustered about the slopes of Mount St. Helens. The June Lake station picked up 9.30 inches, the Swift Creek Station had 7.10 inches and the Sheep Canyon station 6.90 inches. And in Cougar, not far from I-5, totals hit 8.57 inches from the storm. Wow. That’s a pretty powerful punch number one.

Then there’s the melting snow. The snow level climbed to almost 9,000 feet at times during the storm. Not only did that melt lots of mountain snow, but many lower elevation areas north of Clark County had tremendous amounts of snow still on the ground. So that snow melted, too. And that’s punch number two, melted snow almost everywhere.

What’s amazing, is that Vancouver was just on the fringes of all the action, getting just .47 of an inch in 24 hours. With the pineapple express, either you’re getting hit hard, or you’re not. There’s usually not much in-between.

At this point, all of our rivers should be dropping. Anything other than that would be a surprise.

The storms created amazing wind gusts up on Mt. Hood. The peak gust was an incredible 130 miles per hour. But the truth is, gusts topped 100 mph for about 10 hours on Tuesday night. That just shows the power of Mother Nature. Thankfully, we don’t see this kind of power on display very often.

Most of the coming week looks dry.

Bruce Sussman is chief meteorologist at Portland’s CBS affiliate, KOIN Local 6 News. His column appears on Fridays. Reach him at bsussman@koin.com.