Rain Moving Out

I'm very happy with how things have turned out with our midweek stormy weather.  Models have done an excellent job handling rainfall totals and timing, wind, and snow levels.  I suppose the wind speed was a bit lighter, by about 5 mph, than what I expected this morning.  That's about all the fault I can find in models or the forecasting this evening.  As I write this, the back edge of the solid rainband is now sliding over the metro area.  Models had consistently shown the rainfall quickly and dramatically tapering off over the Metro area sometime in the late evening.  They had also shown the very light totals over the Valleys yesterday and mainly dry weather this morning.  As of 8pm, if my addition is correct, it appears that the 48 hour rainfall totals look like this:

Portland- 1.43"
Salem- 1.09"
Kelso- 4.06"
South Fork (Coast Range)- 5.42"
Blazed Alder RAWS (Near Mt. Hood 2600')- 5.10"
Yacolt- 4.77"

I assume the mountain locations may have up to one more inch on the way, so a 5-7" storm total seems pretty reasonable.  If you look two posts back, you can see what our model was forecasting.  I heard someone elsewhere in TV weather land this evening state that we were getting more rain than expected.  I would disagree, these numbers look pretty good!  Kelso was a bit heavy though.

9:05pm addition:  I see that we have a nice front moving through the metro area right now.  It shows up on radar through Clark County, about to hit PDX.  The wind behind it has switched to northwest along with a temperature drop.

Moving on…a very straightforward forecast the next 7 days or so.  A longwave upper level ridge is going to be lingering somewhere near the West Coast.  So not much rain and mild temps, at least outside of the Valleys.  If we get a significant area of surface high pressure centered overhead, fog or low clouds are a sure bet this time of year, keeping temps cool.

Long range models seem to imply a bit more of a change later next week (8-10 days) in LaLa land.  But one thing seems likely…the ski/snowboard season is not going to start early this year.  Probably not even by next weekend since the first possible significant snow in the mountains isn't until right around next weekend itself.  Let's aim for Thanksgiving week…Mark Nelsen