Just a short blog post this afternoon. My family and I are traveling to Utah to visit family for the week, so posts on this blog will unfortunately be less frequent over the next seven days. It’ll be hard for me to take a long vacation, partially because weather never takes a holiday, but I’m sure you’ll all survive without consistent updates for a week 😉

I want to share some thoughts on a building upper ridge which should offer some more summer-like temperatures next week. How warm is still an area of uncertainty, but here’s what it’s currently looking like on the latest models:

The above picture is a snip-it of the WRF GFS model for Thursday of next week provided by the University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences department. This is advertising temperatures in the mid and upper 80s. You’ve probably noticed I use this model a lot to forecast temperatures and precipitation amounts. Another output I don’t feature too often on this blog is the European model (ECMWF) which has all the imperfections any other weather model has, but it serves as another fresh opinion, especially when trying to nail down a hot or cold event, storm or anything in between. Because in weather forecasting, opinions from all the weather sources matter!

So here’s what the ECMWF has to say:

Looks like the same picture in terms of potential. We have two areas of high pressure: one parked out west in the Pacific, another further east. As a result, it appears this will serve to pinch the warm air in between and distribute it all along the west coast. As heights build, so will the heat. As of now it doesn’t look like a major heatwave. In fact, current models are projecting this second wave of warm air could only last a couple days.

It will take a few more model runs and consistency to say for certain how this will all pan out, but so far it looks like our warm August weather is about to reload.

Have a fantastic weekend everyone and be safe!

Matthew Leach

Forecasting Kitsap

Comments? Questions? Weather pics? E-mail them to: forecastingkitsap@live.com