This is a good time to recharge your electric car…especially in the evening.
Reason?
Unusually cool weather is forecast for the next few days in western Washington and Oregon. Seattle is sure to be in the cool ocean air for the next few days, with peaks just reaching LOWER 60s.
In contrast, it will remain warm over the Columbia Basin, with temperatures of 80 degrees in the first part of the week, climbing to 90 degrees by the end of the week.
This pattern is favorable for generating healthy westerly winds along the eastern slopes of the Cascade and through wind farms east of the Cascade Peak.
Taken by Jeffrey Katz
Sea level pressure (solid line), surface wind and low temperature (color) forecast for Tuesday 2 p.m. (below) tells the story. High pressure and cool temperatures (green) offshore, warmer temperatures (orange and red) east of Cascade Crest. You will notice a large pressure difference across the Cascades, which will create strong winds east of the fence.
A similar, but weakened, version of this situation occurred today (Monday) and gusts of up to 30-40 mph around Ellenburg and other eastern slopes (see gusts Monday below).
Even stronger winds will hit Tuesday and Wednesday. The result will be a lot of wind energy. The Bonneville Power summary shows increasing wind output over the past few days (green line)…reaching about a third of demand (red line). Will do even better tomorrow and Wednesday.
Unfortunately, wind energy production in our region is not matching demand. When we have mild temperatures–and less need for air-conditioning– there’s a lot of wind power. But when we actually cook, the wind energy is quite small because there is no westerly wind at that time.
Cool temperatures in the west won’t last forever. The latest forecast suggests that we will warm to near-ideal temperatures in western Washington by the end of next week.
And relatively nasty (’90s) on the Columbia Basin
