Since summer has just arrived, it is natural to consider extended forecasts for the first part of the warm season.
There is considerable forecasting skill for the next ten days, especially if one examines the set of many predictions of the best forecasting system in the world: Central Europe.
Below is the EC’s forecast for rainfall (difference from normal) for the next 10 days. Drier than usual in western Washington, but near normal in California and east of the Cascades. This is good: areas with historic wildfires are expected to experience near-normal rainfall.
As for temperatures, most of the West will be cooler than usual, with the exception of western Washington and BC, as well as the Columbia Valley, with warm parts of Washington just slightly above normal. We saw a lot of these models throughout the spring.
Moving on to longer time ranges, consider the international seasonal sync system incorporating many leading long-range models (IMME). In July, rainfall will be near-normal on the West Coast and slightly wetter than usual in BC.
As for temperatures, IMME predicts California will be cooler than usual and Washington State slightly warmer than usual.
NOAA Climate Prediction Center’s official long-term temperature forecast for July
for near-normal conditions in most of the West, with the exception of slightly warmer-than-normal temperatures in western Oregon and Washington.
Moving on to July rainfall, conditions are predicted to be near-normal along the West Coast.
Key point of all this is that California looks cooler than it did during July– helping to stave off the threat of wildfire down there, especially since it’s already so wet in the Golden State. For Washington State, conditions appear to be relatively close to normal, with the exception that western Washington will be slightly warmer and drier than usual, during what is usually the driest month of the year.
As I will describe in an upcoming blog, it looks like this will be a relatively benign smoky year on the West Coast–with high confidence in the coming month. Wildfire threat extinguished in BC and California. The lower pressure (trough) pattern on the West Coast, which prevails in the spring, is likely to persist into the summer. And this pattern is not favorable for the wildfires in the west.
_________________________________
Notification
I will have a talk about Weather of the foothills west of Cascade on Sunday, June 25 at the Sno-Valley Senior Center, 4610 Stephens Ave., Carnation, WA. 3-5 pm. Open to all. There is a registration link on Facebook:
