Winter-like conditions will visit us over the weekend and into next week….so get ready.
SWEET will hit the passes and higher elevations in the Cascades and other regional terrain, and some new daily cold records will be set at local stations.
Expect snow at Paradise, Mt. Rainier
The National Weather Service’s official forecast for the Paradise visitor center at Mt. Rainier is more reminiscent of winter than late June forecast.
And the Weather Channel’s Seattle forecast (the best in the business) will see a HIGH of 55F on Sunday (with rain), a record-low maximum temperature for that day, with 50C for the whole day. Two and Tuesday. Sorry.
Eastern Washington will also cool off, with peaks reaching around 70F in the Tri-Cities.
The coming period of cold, wet and unseasonal snowfall is associated with a strong, cold depression moving into the area later this week (see upper map (500 hPa, approximately 18,000 ft) in May) Monday morning). Color shade shows temperature: blue is cold! This trough hangs around in weakened form for a whole week!
Total predicted rainfall through Wednesday is shown below. Wet over the entire area except for rain shadows over the Columbia Basin. Heavy rainfall over British Columbia, will have a powerful effect on fighting wildfires there for weeks.
Freezing levels will drop to about 4500 ft on Sunday and snow in the passes and higher elevations will result (see snow totals below through Wednesday morning). The higher terrain in the Cascades will be bleached, with relatively heavy snow in parts of BC and Alberta.
D.lightly Low temperature profile will be broken. Consider SeaTac Airport. The graph of the lowest maximum temperature for June 17-19 for the entire time period (below) shows a record low maximum temperature for the historical period of 57F observed in 2022 and 2010 . As noted above, the WeatherChannel will be at 55F, which will be a new cold record.
There will be others as well.
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This cold period is followed by above-normal warmth in mid-May.
The bottom line in all of this is that if you want to enjoy Father’s Day then it’s best to move the celebrations inside. And I fear for the tomato plants in our garden… they will NOT be happy.
