Weather Eye: Weather delivers taste of October, but warm days not over yet
By Patrick Timm
Published: September 10, 2019, 6:00am
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Patrick Timm is a local weather specialist. His column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Reach him at patricktimm.com.
If you think the weather is behaving more like October you may be right. It seems like we get the cold instability showers and funnel clouds in April and then six months later. I know it isn’t October but the weather often does not follow climatology.
Monday afternoon I was driving from Ridgefield and it was dark as night and pouring down rain. By the time I got to Salmon Creek it was partly sunny and dry. And so it goes with these upper-level low pressure systems.
The sun comes out and warms the lower reaches of the atmosphere and rises, colliding with the colder air aloft. Boom, thunder, lightning, downpours, possible funnel clouds or even a brief tornado.
I’m trying to remember the last time we had a tornado warning in the month of September. Vancouver received less than one-half inch of rain Sunday officially while many of you had 1 or 2 inches of rain. Some roadways were a foot deep of water curb to curb.
Tom Dixon in the Amboy area had 1.97 inches of rain from midnight to midnight Sunday. He had another .37 of an inch later Monday morning. This rain has does wonders for putting out the wildfire season on an early note.
Of course, we can have some dry and warm weather later this month and into October with east winds. But as least we have dampened things greatly. Vancouver is running wetter than normal so far this month.
Today we see more scattered showers but with less chance of thunderstorms. Wednesday and Thursday, we catch a break with more sunshine and warmer temperatures. Maybe we see 80 degrees on Thursday.
Another trough of low-pressure slides over us and the chance of rain or showers goes up Friday into early next week. I don’t think we see a repeat of the wild and crazy weather we just had, but who knows?
Meanwhile, enjoy the break in the action coming up and get into the autumn spirit.
