Locally, we managed to escape the fury of the “bomb cyclone” that was off our coastline Tuesday. The definition of a bomb cyclone is an area of low pressure that develops quickly and falls at least 24 millibars in 24 hours. Areas of high and low pressure around the globe are expressed in millibars rather than inches of pressure.
For instance, a typical house barometer and the pressure readings you may see on your phone are in inches. The lowest pressure Vancouver measured Tuesday during the height of the storm was 29.44 inches. The storm well off the coast dropped to 942 millibars (27.82 inches), which may be a new record low for the Pacific Ocean off the Washington Coast. If you have a barometer at home, I doubt it even displays anything below 28 inches. So, yes, a monster storm but the location is everything.
If the low had been inside 130 degrees longitude or closer to our coast, we would have had a potentially strong windstorm with southerly winds. Locally we had some strong gusty easterly winds off the Cascades and out of the Gorge mainly in the 30-45 mph range. And yes, we had scattered power outages in Clark County which we get with many of our fall and winter storms.
Now in the Puget Sound region it was a different story. Geographically, they have more gaps off the Cascades and with the extremely low pressure off the coast and higher pressure east of the Cascades, that air went rushing toward the center of that storm. Winds burst to 60-75 mph in the far eastern suburbs and even Seattle reached 60 mph. The result was widespread power outages.
