Mostly Dry

Greetings from Canyonville, OR.  Fair weather ahead for much of the next 2 weeks.  Mug ☕️ ready?

Indeed.  Decent December wx ahead through much of this week and on into the weekend of Dec 16,17.  There will be a weak front pass over the PNW late Wed evening.  Most, if not all, of the precip will fall after sunset over the Olympic Range, Vancouver Is & the NW corner of WA.  Snow in the northern WA Cascades.  That system will yield to a dry Thu & Fri, with the exception of the north 1/2 of Vancouver Is.  EAST WIND really get craned up out of the Columbia River Gorge starting overnight Thu.  That wind will help mitigate fog in some locations west side.

The weekend of Dec 16,17 is now trending totally DRY for the entire PNW, with an offshore flow.  As a system moves into the region from the SW on Mon Dec 18, expect those east winds to be making a play.  Rain should return to start that week around the region.  Drying from north-to-south on Tue Dec 19 afternoon.  A large Pacific Low (trough) will settle in west of the CA coast through the rest of the week Dec 18-22.  There may be increased PNW cloudiness on Fri Dec 22, if that Low moves east over northern CA. 

For our Patrons in the Golden State -> your turn for a wet cycle.  As noted above, the large Pacific Low will spin rain fields over ALL of CA on & off from Dec 18 through Christmas.  A windy system may hit the Bay area Christmas Eve, before a deluge arrives for a very stormy Christmas Day.  A 2023 El Niño gift.

Patrons in the PNW will also get back into the wet mode sometime during the Christmas Eve weekend, depending on the track of the Low mentioned above.  Earlier model solutions pushed the storms into the PNW; but the later runs drive them into CA.  We’ll lean that way, for now.

White Watch.  🎄Christmas Day:  breezy & wet, with heavy rain & strong winds in CA, much less so over the PNW.  We’ll nail this down later, but for now, no White Christmas is charting this year, as of Dec 11.  That said, there are indications of a colder air mass working its way over the Gulf of Alaska, and eventually into the PNW (?).  We will watch closely, but there is a chance for low elevations snowfall late Dec.  Also, a wind producer may develop for the 29th.  Will that storm hit CA or the PNW? 

Overall: looks like 10-11 out of the next 14 days will present dry daylight hours for the PNW .