Wet, wet, wet. That sums up our weather forecast for the week as we will endure two moderate to heavy rain events. One will take place tonight and Wednesday and the other Thursday into Friday. It is a complex situation and will be changing by the hour.
Both will be an atmospheric river of some degree and knowing exactly where they set up and stall is a wait-and-see situation. The wettest event appears as of Monday to focus on Southern Oregon and Northern California, where they could see days of heavy rain and get spared from any serious flooding.
You may have heard of a bomb cyclone off the coast heading our way. The deepest pressure gradients stay well off the coast, and we escape strong south winds. It will be breezy tonight and Wednesday, but we have a chance depending how close the storm gets to the coastline for strong Cascade gap winds. Surely locations in the foothills east of Seattle will have high winds. It’s possible we could for a few hours get strong east winds through the Gorge with the extremely low barometric pressure readings a few hundred miles off the coast.
My gut feeling is that we have moderate rain and breezy conditions but not a big windstorm. Of course, check the latest local forecasts this evening. After this we have another low developing on the coattails of the first and more rain and high-elevation snow will present itself. The heavy snow that is falling in the Cascades now will turn to rain in a day or two. The snowpack will soak up much of the liquid precipitation and melt slowly. By the weekend cooler air arrives and snow levels drop down to pass levels.
