Alex Hopmann’s Blog

Cliff Mass is a meteorologist at University of Washington and frequent contributer to KUOW our local public radio station and has been publishing an excellent blog about weather, especially focused on the weather of the Pacific NW. I’ve been very interested in weather lately, mostly stemming from needing to understand it as a pilot, although its often useful to help guess whether a given day will be a good one for skiing. Most weather reporting tends to be far too dumbed down for me, but Cliff appears to be blogging about the real details (while presenting it in an approachable way), plus the focus on the phenomena of the NW is really helpful.

So, some clarification based on the latest weather data. It looks like there WILL be some seriously high winds at higher elevations- roughly 2000 feet and above (the aviation forecasts are showing 20-30mph winds at the surface but warn of a wind shear to 65mph between the surface and 2000 feet). So folks up in the mountains are going to get blasted, but down where most of the population is, it should be a normal storm.

Meanwhile in huge letters the Everett Hearld proclaims “‘Mega-storm’ brewing”… Cue the scary music.

The other strange thing is that the winds at 2000ft will be out of the East which is a really strange pattern for our area. I just hope that the storm doesn’t cause any huge damage to the local ski area’s chair-lifts.

All the TV news are hyping up a National Weather Service advisory that we are supposed to have some crazy big wind storm with sustained winds 50-70mph, gusts to 90mph tomorrow night. If the winds really hit that big, it would be a big deal.

The thing is, from reading the weather data, I don’t see it. Check here- http://adds.aviationweather.gov/winds/. You can scroll different time periods, and of course anyone reading this weeks from now all the old data will be gone.

In any case, what I see is a low pressure front coming in off the cost tomorrow afternoon/evening. I see some 50mph surface winds off the coast, but I don’t see anything coming inland to Seattle more than 25mph. Also, while its a low, its not that strong of a low as such things go (989 mb). As it develops Sunday morning the strong winds will be to the SW of the low, well off shore. By the time the low comes on shore its 1001mb, which is hardly a low at all, and the winds are no big deal.

The only possible thing is that the pressure lines do stack up pretty tightly on the East side of the low which is right over Seattle. So while the winds forecast doesn’t show anything there, it could be disguised. But I’m still suspicious that this isn’t really that big a deal.

We will know in a couple of days- I’ll report back whether I was right or not.

This morning at about 5:30am there were two gigantic thunder-claps. Apparently the National Weather Service said Seattle had an episode of “thundersnow” around 5:30 a.m. when a storm cell moved across Puget Sound. I’ve never seen anything like it and it doesn’t seem like our weather patterns would have matched any of the normal descriptions of how it occurs.