Tis the season for a holiday chill, and luckily those waiting in anticipation for that very thing will be pretty happy this weekend. Now I know what a lot of you are thinking right now: cut all the fluff and tell us if it’s going to snow or not. Patience, friends! Patience. I’ll tell you right now we’re not going to be experiencing a Roland Emmerich-type weather event this weekend, so if you were hoping to be able to crank out those ice skates instead of taking the ferry and glide your way to Seattle over the solidly frozen Puget Sound, you may want to stop reading.
But for those who have much more modest expectations, this forecast may not be a complete waste. First of all, weather models have been all over the place. It’s quite the challenge to decide what to make of this upcoming chilly pattern, so it looks like most meteorologists will have no choice but to be conservative. Taking an average of all the past model runs, here’s what I’m thinking will be the general pattern for the next week:
- Wet, but not soaking weather through Thursday. Highs will be close to seasonal averages.
- Much cooler from Friday through Sunday. At this time, highs will struggle to make it out of the 30s on Saturday with overnight lows close to freezing
- Heavier precipitation early Friday and Saturday mornings could produce a few snowflakes on the highest hills. As always, the closest you are to the Hood Canal, the more likely it is you will see some wet snow.
- If it does decide to snow, little to no snow accumulation is expected.
- My eye is on the even colder weather that could manifest itself late next week
So these are the current observations. Without question the mountains will be greatly benefiting from all this cool/showery weather, so even if you don’t see some snowflakes fall where you are, at least you know where to find it 🙂
And of course the golden question: Will we have a White Christmas this year? Not only is it far too early to be talking about that, but since the models are having so much difficulty with the short term, why would they be any better in the long term? Sure, the current trend is for a colder than normal weather pattern as we get closer to Christmas, but at this time it is still too early to tell what that day might bring!
We’ll just take the forecast one snowflake at a time 🙂 If you see any flakes this weekend, please let me know!
Matthew Leach
Forecasting Kitsap
E-mail: forecastingkitsap@live.com
