Happy Friday! We have a few isolated showers this morning, mainly east and northeast of Everett to the Border. The rest of the area is mainly dry but cloudy and warmer than this time yesterday. We’ll dry out as the morning goes on with mostly cloudy conditions this afternoon along with highs in the upper-40s and lower-50s.
Saturday will sport some early morning fog in spots and low clouds with some afternoon sunbreaks in the interior. Highs will be around 50. Some light rain will move in at the coast, Olympics, and north interior of the area through the mid to late afternoon with rain at times areawide Saturday evening into Saturday night. Snow levels will have already risen to above 4,000 feet as precipitation moves in so it’ll just be rain in pass locations.
Sunday will be rainy with highs warming to the lower 50s ahead of a moderate atmospheric river system that drops south from Vancouver Island. Snow levels jump to above 6,000 feet on Sunday as precipitation gets heavier late. Expect heavy rain areawide on Sunday through much of Monday with rain in the lowlands of more than one inch and 2-6 inches in the mountains with snow levels rising to above 7,000 feet by Monday morning. It’ll be breezy as well to start the work week.
While this early week bout of heavy rain is associated with an atmospheric river, it is important to point out that the duration of the heavy rain will be relatively brief (36 hours or less) and by the time we get into Tuesday, the rain will be tapering off. In other words, nothing like what we experienced in December. Still, rivers will rise though only the Skokomish River in Mason County is forecast to reach flood stage early next week — and minor at that. We’ll be monitoring in case any other rivers get close to minor flood stage, but this should be a relatively low-impact event.
Once we dry out on Tuesday, we see temperatures soar to the mid to upper 50s through Wednesday with even some locations in the southern parts of the area getting into the 60s Wednesday with some sunshine. We’ll cool back down to the upper 40s to lower 50s later next week but we look to stay dry across Western Washington for about a week or possibly longer — from mid-next week to sometime later the following week. Morning fog will be a concern after we dry out next week, but the mountains will have sunshine and likely somewhat warmer temperatures than the lowlands.
While we’ve been excited about the snow of the last few days in the mountains, the above forecast is not great news to keep building snowpack, and some of the warmer rain Sunday-Monday will knock the snowpack numbers down with no refill coming anytime soon thereafter, and some melting with temperatures above average.
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