Early Cold Snap Delivers; But Back to Mild & Dry

8pm Monday…

It’s a beautiful October evening! A nice view of sunset from several of our weather cameras

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Sunset view from Dayton, Vancouver, Seaside, Mt. Hood, & Lincoln City

Everything turned out just about as expected late last week through this morning. A chilly Canadian airmass dropped down into the Western USA right on schedule. Gusty northeast wind arrived in the metro area Saturday afternoon, clearing out the cloud cover and leftover morning sprinkles. Spokane ended up with the snowiest October on record. Around a half foot in that area. Temperatures hardly rose Saturday as the colder air moved in.

Then Sunday (yesterday) we saw a very chilly and windy day. Peak wind gust at PDX was 39 mph yesterday. Highs stayed in the upper 40s in Portland; one of the colder October days we’ve seen in the last few decades

Skies remained clear last night, dewpoints were down in the teens, and east wind backed off. That gave us just perfect “radiational cooling” conditions. Portland (airport) officially dropped to 29 degrees this morning. That was the earliest 29 in many years, although we’ve hit 30 earlier in the month in some years. Check out the rest of the metro area…

Some records were set too, the coldest October 26th in Portland, Hillsboro, & Eugene.

You might be wondering how cold it can get in October? The all-time October records…

I’ve hardly mentioned the eastern half of the state…brrrr!

Ignore Hermiston, there are a bunch of missing observations during the night. A warming airmass today, along with low relative humidity, allowed afternoon temps to climb rapidly. Redmond went from 9 this morning to 57 this afternoon!

What’s ahead?

Mild and mainly dry weather. Notice the ECMWF monthly run last night shows upper-level heights well above average this week

Then next week looks similar, possibly slightly wetter. That’s a warm pattern across much of the USA for the first week of November

A mild westerly flow, aided by a continuing “warm” eastern Pacific tells me we’re headed back into warmer than normal conditions for at least the next 10 days

With the main jet stream shunted north of us we can expect drier than normal conditions to continue. Just one weak system Friday afternoon/evening and that should be it for October rain. Another very dry month

Looking farther ahead, the ECMWF ensemble average paints drier than normal weather through the first week of November.

The monthly run of the GEFS is similar…very dry well into November. The new/improved GFS ensembles (in September) are now run 5 weeks into the future, once per day. But remember accuracy goes downhill after 10-14 days. You get the idea…dry. We’ll see.

To summarize:

1. There’s no sign of a rainy/wet pattern in the next 7-10 days. We’ll be much drier than average.
2. Significant snow at the Cascade ski resorts is unlikely over the next week or so.
3. Have some outdoor projects you STILL haven’t finished? You’ve been given a reprieve! Lots of good/dry outdoor weather ahead in what is typically the beginning of the rainy season

Chief Meteorologist Mark Nelsen