Inland Northwest Hay Weather

If you woke up this (Thursday) morning, feeling like it was fall, you weren’t alone. Having fog and low clouds in early August is a rare treat. But don’t despair. Summer will make a reappearance by this weekend. But first, we have one last round of showers and thunderstorms this afternoon. Here is what one computer model thinks the radar will look like at 2pm this afternoon.  These showers and storms should move to the southeast, affecting the Spokane area by late in the day.  The next couple of mornings will be rather chilly, with lows in the lower to mid 40s.  Open the windows in the evening and see how cold you can get the indoor temperature. On today’s weather map below you can see the culprit of this latest rain, with a decent low pressure system over the  Northwest moving into the northern Rockies. But you can also see an area of high pressure developing off the coast of the PacNW. This trend will continue, so that by the end of the weekend, the weather map sho...

We have another potential opportunity for some rain later this week. But this will be very different from the rain last week. In that situation, the moisture was coming at us from the south, resulting in very muggy weather and heavy thunderstorms. In the case coming up, the storm is coming at us from the west. Typically this pattern in the summer yields very little if any rainfall for our side of the Cascades. But in this instance, the computer models beg to differ.  This is also not a good pattern for thunderstorms like we saw last week. First I’ll start off with the National Blend of Models (NBM). Remember, this is a blend of over 100 computer forecasts plus bias adjustment. It expects the rain to start Wednesday night and continue through Thursday. This pattern of rain looks pretty standard for this kind of storm and will probably verify the best.  But there are a few other ideas that the computers are throwing out, as usual.  First I’ll show you the US GFS model, zoom...