Remember back in September when I did a blog post on the correlation between first frosts and first flakes? If not, you can click here to read that post. Interestingly, within the past 10 years the Bremerton area ALWAYS saw a first frost sometime in October, but not this time. Although we came close, we never got below freezing.
So yes, we broke a 10 year trend, but at least it wasn’t by much. Bremerton Airport reported a very chilly 30 degrees last night, resulting in areas of spotty frost and freezes. So what does this mean? Will the snow flakes start falling later because the frost arrived later? Not exactly. In fact, rather disappointingly, my study found that there was actually very little correlation between a first frost and first snow, so at least we’ve got that off our backs!
But we must also remember what weather pattern will be in play this winter: La Nada, or neutral. Neutral winters are so viciously wild card that literally anything can happen for any certain length of time. This certainly doesn’t make long range forecasting any easier, but at least it’s good news we won’t be too far into a drought or flooding scenario, which El Nino’s and La Nina’s tend to bring, respectively.
In fact, the rest of the week into next week doesn’t look anything close to a drought. Luckily, Mother Nature is pressing pause on our weather pattern enough to offer peaks of blue skies for any early weekend plans, but boy does the tune change when we start the new week. More mountain snow and lowland rain will fall from time to time throughout the week with highs near 50.
I honestly don’t see any signs of snow or a rain/snow mix in the long range, although temperatures will remain cool. As of right now it looks like a seasonably rainy Thanksgiving this year, but it’s still a bit too early to tell 😉
In the meantime, enjoy this upcoming weekend!
Matthew Leach
Forecasting Kitsap
E-mail: forecastingkitsap@live.com
