Hurricane Rain in the Inland NW?

I mentioned in the last blog that sometimes the remnants of hurricanes get ingested into the jet stream. And this usually causes problems for the numerical forecast computers. Well, in this case, it’s possible that the remnants of Lala (which struck Hawaii last week) could play a role in our upcoming weather. 

I’ll show you 4 weather maps of atmospheric moisture. I’ve added a red L to show you Lala remnants. The first map is from Friday morning. Lala is way out by the dateline, on the far upper left edge of the image. 





By Sunday, Lala’s remnants have been picked up by the jet stream and are located at the tip of the Aleutian Islands. 




On Monday, the remnants of Lala will be nearing Alaska. Another low pressure system over Alaska will drop southward at the same time. 




By Tuesday, the Alaskan low has rapidly deepened as in ingested Lala’s moisture. It’s forecast to be located by the Queen Charlotte Islands at that point, heading for the Pacific Northwest.




Here’s a different way to view this.  With a trajectory model, I can locate a box at Lala’s current location, and then watch where the box goes.  Below is that forecast.



You can see the forecast starts where the star is located, tracks over Alaska, down the west coast of North America, crossing over California and into Montana by Wednesday.

Here’s a forecast timeline of precipitation chances at Deer Park for the next 10 days.


You can see a small chance of rain on Saturday, mainly across the northern counties of Washington.  But then a much better chance of rain shows up starting Tuesday night and peaking Wednesday night and Thursday.

Here’s the rainfall forecast from four forecast  models for Thursday and Friday.






This is still a ways in the future.  The low could dive farther south and miss us.  We’ll have to wait to see how Lala’s remnants play out.  

Now I’m not saying that our rain will come directly from Lala necessarily.  But it could be one source of moisture for our upcoming rain event.  










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