Merry Christmas!
Wishing you a warm and happy day with family and friends as the weather outside is green this year, not white like last year. But, that’s OK. A dry day on Christmas is actually a bonus as usually every day in December is cool and damp. We’ll have the cool part but I think rain holds off until Wednesday.
With a cool lingering air mass today, the incoming weather system for Wednesday could bring some wet snow or a mix down to lower elevations at its start. We’ll see. But if traveling, beware snow could be on roadways down to 1,000 feet or lower until the snow levels rise in the afternoon. At least the mountains had a good dumping of snow over the weekend with close to a foot and a half on Mount Hood. That’s a good thing because we need it.
Remember 10 years ago in 2008? Locally we had anywhere from a foot to 2 feet of snow on the ground Christmas Day around the county. It all began about 10 days before Christmas with snow, then freezing rain and then more snow. I still have thoughts of picking people up and taking them to work in my four-wheel-drive vehicle. Most side streets and even some main roadways were not plowed and with the layer of ice between the snow, deep ruts kept many sedans off the road due to high-centering. It was like driving a slot car. Wow, that was a Christmas to remember.
At least this week, I see no big windstorms like last week that had thousands without power around Puget Sound for days with most coming back online over the weekend. Coastal communities weathered the storms in fair shape, except those high tides caused tidal flooding along our coastline and excessive beach erosion in places. Trees down and power outages are normal for winter storms there.
