You’d better take out your sweater. And your umbrella too.
You will need them Because temperatures will be so cold, highs on Friday and Saturday will be about 15F cooler than normal.
Cool temperatures with abundant rainfall throughout the region.
Some locations in the Northwest can get as cold as near freezing. And snow will fall again in higher elevations.
Let’s start with the accumulated rainfall starting this morning.
By 5pm tomorrow, rain will be falling on Vancouver Island and the coast.
Looking closer to western Washington, the rainfall totals through Sunday morning were staggering (see below), with much of the region seeing more than an inch of rain. August is shaping up to be a higher-than-normal total.
And then there will be cold – the terrible cold of August 2024.
For Seattle, weather.com predicts a high of 63F on Saturday (below) and mid-70s in the Tri-Cities. The normal high temperature in Seattle right now is 77F.
UW’s WRF weather forecast model shows extremely cold temperatures Saturday morning, especially in eastern Oregon (see below).
Temperatures down to 30 degrees F occurred widely in both eastern Oregon and the Cascades. Some cold spots will experience their first frosts this season.
Daily cold temperature records are likely to be broken over the weekend.
What about snow?
Snowfall totals as of Sunday morning show snow in the high elevations of California, Oregon, Idaho and Washington.
What causes this cool/wet phenomenon?
Answer: an unusually strong upper-level low pressure area off the Oregon coast (see upper-level map as of 2 p.m. Friday).
Some local newspapers have had strong headlines when the region has been warmer than normal. Will they do the same for extremes in the opposite direction?
