Return of Summer

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 should look something like this:



This will bring us much warmer temperatures, reaching into the lower 90s by Sunday and mid 90s by Monday.  Previous forecasts were for this trend to continue, rendering a very hot week for us.  But the latest thinking has changed.  Instead, the computers now expect the high pressure to move westward, away from us.  So by Wednesday, our weather map should look something like this, with high pressure moving into the Gulf of Alaska.


This pattern allows cooler air to move into our area from the northwest.  Keep an eye on the forecast.  We could see a warm and windy Tuesday or Wednesday with this pattern.  Chances of rain with is pattern look very low with highs in the mid 80s for the second half of the week.  

Looking farther into the remainder of the month there’s no strong signal of hot or cool weather.  So the best bet is to expect 80s or lower 90s to continue.

For those of you who are always keeping an eye on the winter outlook, I’ll give you a little teaser.  Very few of the multitude of long range models see an El Niño or a La Niña for this upcoming winter. Nearly all of the forecasts below stay in between the two horizontal dashed lines.  This would indicate a “Neutral” winter, which we don’t often see.  I’ll be talking in a future blog what that could mean for our area for winter 2025/26.







Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Showers and Storms this Week

Image
The last week of July is (on average) the hottest week of the summer.  We are looking at 90s Mon-Thu this week, so this may be following the pattern.  The longest day of the year is June 20th, with 16 hours of daylight in Spokane.  By the end of July, we've already lost just over an hour of that.  Not that the length of day is the only factor of hot weather, but it obviously has an effect.  The days noticeably get shorter in August, losing about 3 minutes of sunshine each day. We were talking in the last blog about the potential for showers and thunderstorms this week.  As usual, things are becoming a bit clearer on timing and coverage.   Afternoon and evening thunderstorms will increase over the next few days over eastern Oregon, slowly creeping north each day. By Tuesday, the southern Washington Cascades could see an isolated storm.  Wednesday will see the potential for afternoon thunderstorms over most Washington mountains. Here’s the European ...
Read more

Weather After the Rain

Image
It took some patience, but eventually the rain fell in most places. It doesn’t make up for our dry spell, but it sure helped.  Here’s how much rain fell from the weekend storm.  Here’s a different view of the rainfall over the weekend.  It’s actually pretty close to the forecast graphics I was showing you last week.   So what can we expect for the next 10 days?  Kind of a temperature roller coaster.  After a showery Monday, we’ll warm up quickly on Tuesday, back into the lower to mid 80s.  A mostly dry cool front on Wednesday will bring some mountain showers, breezy winds and cooler temperatures.  We’ll be back in the 70s for Thursday and Friday with more mountain showers over northeast Washington. High pressure from the west will build into our area for the weekend, quickly sending temperatures climbing into the 80s, with 90s by Monday of next week. Beyond this things get more iffy.  There isn’t any clear cut agreement among the compute...
Read more

Uncertain Fourth

Image
In the previous blog I mentioned that there was too much uncertainty in the computer forecasts to look very far into the future. Unfortunately that’s still the case.  I’ve shown the graph below on a previous occasion, but it can be a little confusing so I try not to mention it. So I’ll try to explain. There are three computer centers that produce multiple computer forecasts.  The US, the Canadian, and the European. All together they produce 100 computer forecasts. You can easily average them all together, but this can hide possible scenarios. So another way is to look for clusters of solutions. Below shows four possible scenarios for July 2nd. It doesn’t take a meteorologist to figure out that each one is different.  Some have the hot high pressure (orange color) over the Northwest.  This would bring hot and dry weather.  But the other two have the high pressure to our east.  This would mean a cooler forecast for us, along with a threat of showers. And each...
Read more