February 2024 Weather in the PNW

[snow_wizard]

2 minutes ago, bainbridgekid said:

18z GFS got rid of the Saturday night snow for Puget Sound, but replaced it with more snow Friday night and Sunday night.

Going to be very difficult tracking things the next week with how many different meandering weak systems come through here.

The good news is every run shows good chances.  We could see something pretty substantial if everything goes right.

[Cascadia_Wx]

1 minute ago, snow_wizard said:

The good news is every run shows good chances.  We could see something pretty substantial if everything goes right.

Wolves weren’t responsible for woodland caribou going extinct in WA state.

[snow_wizard]

I have to say the lowlands couldn't have done much worse collectively with the current trough than we did.  Hopefully later this week will be better.

[snow_wizard]

1 minute ago, Cascadia_Wx said:

Wolves weren’t responsible for woodland caribou going extinct in WA state.

I hope that's true.  I read that online recently.  Bummer that it happened regardless of the cause.

[BLI snowman]

3 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

I have to say the lowlands couldn't have done much worse collectively with the current trough than we did.  Hopefully later this week will be better.

Seems like this trough went about as expected. A decent 2-4" snowfall in the convergence zone and not much else. Screaming onshore flow + limited precip isn't a great combination and this never looked like much more than that.

We will likely be running into the same problem to varying degrees with the next round.

Edited February 27 by BLI snowman

[snow_wizard]

The 18z GEFS is colder.  The 850 mean bottoms out at -7.3.  A degree lower than previous runs.

[TacomaWx]

1 minute ago, BLI snowman said:

Seems like this trough went about as expected. A decent 2-4" snowfall in the convergence zone and not much else. Screaming onshore flow + limited precip isn't a great combination and this never looked like much more than that.

We will likely be running into the same problem to varying degrees with the next round.

Yeah, as fun as those maps are to look at it’ll take more things going right than wrong for things to work out for us I-5 corridor peasants. 

[snow_wizard]

2 minutes ago, BLI snowman said:

Seems like this trough went about as expected. A decent 2-4" snowfall in the convergence zone and not much else. Screaming onshore flow + limited precip isn't a great combination and this never looked like much more than that.

We will likely be running into the same problem to varying degrees with the next round.

Mossman and Snowmizer barely got anything.  That is pretty newsworthy with a trough like this.  Models were a lot wetter / snowier than what actually happened.  I thought for sure the WA Coast would score way better than they did.

[bainbridgekid]

I have a FB Weather group and two people reported 7" last night with pictures. One was near Freeland on Whidbey Island and the other was near Sultan along US-2. I bet the very center of that CZ probably got 10" in a few small spots with how narrow and stationary it was.

[snow_wizard]

2 minutes ago, TacomaWx said:

Yeah, as fun as those maps are to look at it’ll take more things going right than wrong for things to work out for us I-5 corridor peasants. 

He was right to an extent, but it could have easily gone way better.  This was the low end of what was likely to happen.

[snow_wizard]

1 minute ago, bainbridgekid said:

I have a FB Weather group and two people reported 7" last night with pictures. One was near Freeland on Whidbey Island and the other was near Sultan along US-2. I bet the very center of that CZ probably got 10" in a few small spots with how narrow and stationary it was.

Yeah....I noticed the Islands looked pretty nuts last night on the radar.

[MossMan]

3 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

Mossman and Snowmizer barely got anything.  That is pretty newsworthy with a trough like this.  Models were a lot wetter / snowier than what actually happened.  I thought for sure the WA Coast would score way better than they did.

Fred scored in Everett! Our family lake house west of Smokey Point got 3”, and my cousin out on Whidbey got 8”! 
I got 1” upping my season total to 4”! 

Edited February 27 by MossMan

[TacomaWx]

3 minutes ago, bainbridgekid said:

I have a FB Weather group and two people reported 7" last night with pictures. One was near Freeland on Whidbey Island and the other was near Sultan along US-2. I bet the very center of that CZ probably got 10" in a few small spots with how narrow and stationary it was.

February 2011 had some similar narrow convergence bands. Up north got 2’ in spots. One of the luckiest snow events in my life here with 7” falling under one band here in north Tacoma…with much less north of here and a couple inches down south. I remember my grandpa who lives at 900’ out in graham being astounded by me and my brother saying we had more than double the snow he had. 

[snow_wizard]

Even Clearview has no snow on the ground.  Maybe they did this morning, but not now.

[snow_wizard]

2 minutes ago, TacomaWx said:

February 2011 had some similar narrow convergence bands. Up north got 2’ in spots. One of the luckiest snow events in my life here with 7” falling under one band here in north Tacoma…with much less north of here and a couple inches down south. I remember my grandpa who lives at 900’ out in graham being astounded by me and my brother saying we had more than double the snow he had. 

Feb 2011 had pretty widespread snow though.  I do remember some places had quite a bit more though.  The coverage last night was severely limited for what we had to work with.

[bainbridgekid]

1 minute ago, snow_wizard said:

Even Clearview has no snow on the ground.  Maybe they did this morning, but not now.

Friend in Mill Creek got 5" just NW of Clearview, but there was a very sharp cutoff on both the North and South side of the CZ. On my drive to work in Mountlake Terrace this morning it went from snow covered roads to zero snow on the ground in a couple miles.

[SilverFallsAndrew]

15 minutes ago, BLI snowman said:

Seems like this trough went about as expected. A decent 2-4" snowfall in the convergence zone and not much else. Screaming onshore flow + limited precip isn't a great combination and this never looked like much more than that.

We will likely be running into the same problem to varying degrees with the next round.

What’s coming up seems a lot juicier. At least for NW Oregon. 

[TacomaWx]

1 minute ago, snow_wizard said:

Feb 2011 had pretty widespread snow though.  I do remember some places had quite a bit more though.  The coverage last night was severely limited for what we had to work with.

I think the central sound in some areas got screwed in 2011. I remember going to my dad’s house in Auburn and it looked like someone sprinkled powdered sugar on the lawn and that was it. 

[Phishy Wx]

good grief GFS WAY OUT TO LUNCH, like in another country out to lunch, like took a plane there out to lunch

[MossMan]

8 minutes ago, TacomaWx said:

February 2011 had some similar narrow convergence bands. Up north got 2’ in spots. One of the luckiest snow events in my life here with 7” falling under one band here in north Tacoma…with much less north of here and a couple inches down south. I remember my grandpa who lives at 900’ out in graham being astounded by me and my brother saying we had more than double the snow he had. 

Yeah I got 16” out of that and was on the southern edge, Mt Vernon got buried with 24”+ totals! 

[MossMan]

Snowing at work again! 

[Skagit Weather]

6 minutes ago, MossMan said:

Yeah I got 16” out of that and was on the southern edge, Mt Vernon got buried with 24”+ totals! 

I "only" got 11", but places a couple miles to my east really got hit hard. People had to abandon their vehicles on I-5 in Mount Vernon and Burlington when it ended up snowing 18" in 3-4 hours!

[NorthBend RainEnthusiast]

1 hour ago, the_convergence_zone said:

The key question for future decades is the extent to which the Clausius-Clapeyron moisture feedbacks are influencing this pattern.

I have not seen the words "Clausius-Clapeyron" for a decade, thanks for the flashback to grad school. Definitely a factor when calculating melting temperatures with depth throughout the thickness of an ice sheet.

It's been snowing consistently at 33.5°F here for a few hours, nothing accumulating but it's beautiful (especially since everything is already snow-covered).

Hard to not feel spoiled up here when even for a "quiet" winter I'd still give it a high score. In January, we had a week of very cold temps (down to 9°F!), frigid winds and power outages, all with a few inches of snow on the ground. Then this week we've had a couple days of snow now, plenty enough to pull the kids on the sled. 

[SilverFallsAndrew]

Oh… okay…

[Deweydog]

42 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

You have a reasonable shot at getting some seepage up there.  The chances down here are a lot lower though not non existent.

I’ve made it D**n near 49 years without any seepage issues and I’d like to think I can make it at least a few more.

[TacomaWx]

5 minutes ago, NorthBend RainEnthusiast said:

I have not seen the words "Clausius-Clapeyron" for a decade, thanks for the flashback to grad school. Definitely a factor when calculating melting temperatures with depth throughout the thickness of an ice sheet.

It's been snowing consistently at 33.5°F here for a few hours, nothing accumulating but it's beautiful (especially since everything is already snow-covered).

Hard to not feel spoiled up here when even for a "quiet" winter I'd still give it a high score. In January, we had a week of very cold temps (down to 9°F!), frigid winds and power outages, all with a few inches of snow on the ground. Then this week we've had a couple days of snow now, plenty enough to pull the kids on the sled. 

Yeah down by the 18/I-90 merger we’ve been going between rain/snow and rain. I can see just a couple hundred feet up on the hills around me is all snow. 
 I’d love to live up in this area. Would be the perfect amount of interesting weather for my taste! 

[MossMan]

2 minutes ago, Deweydog said:

I’ve made it D**n near 49 years without any seepage issues and I’d like to think I can make it at least a few more.

But…ITS COMING! 

[Sunriver Snow Zone]

Just now, MossMan said:

Fred scored in Everett! Our family lake house west of Smokey Point got 3”, and my cousin out on Whidbey got 8”! 

My cousin also lives at whidbey! Although he's at useless bay, so he only ended up with an inch. Useless bay sure was Useless last night in terms of snow.

[BLI snowman]

2 minutes ago, SilverFallsAndrew said:

Oh… okay…

And yet I don't think I see a single instance where PDX hits 32 for the whole week!

[TigerWoodsLibido]

4 minutes ago, BLI snowman said:

And yet I don't think I see a single instance where PDX hits 32 for the whole week!

Yeah the KEZI and KVAL weather guys aren't even mentioning snow falling on Thursday. I think a lot of this is phantom snow.

[the_convergence_zone]

3 hours ago, Front Ranger said:

What is the reason they have been centered so persistently over the PNW, and not other places?

That's the key question -- there's clearly some component driven by the Phil stuff -- global circulation response to climate forcing like the Hadley expansion.

We already have a persistent ridge over the Rocky Mountains in summer (instead of an anomaly plot, just plot up the climatological mean 500 hPa heights), so the anomaly plots from the last 10 years are showing the amplification of a feature that's already there. It's not like ridging is being created out of thin air, there was already a climatological ridge there. And I would postulate that the moisture component is accelerating that because it is further amplifying the temperature and pressure differences between the ocean and mountains because the land is warming faster than the ocean and the land is drying out in our region in summer. 

So I would argue the unique aspects of our topography are already responsible for our dry summers and that whole pattern is just being amplified by climate change. And thus there isn't a reason to expect that big height anomaly blob to move in the future, the last 10 years are likely an indication of what to continue to expect moving forward.

[Rubus Leucodermis]

Down to 34.9˚F. Just took a short walk and minor stickage is happening just uphill from me (perhaps 100' higher). So hopefully soon IMBY.

[snow_wizard]

FWIW the GEFS is significantly snowier than previous runs, which have been surprisingly subdued with the snow chances.

[snow_wizard]

2 minutes ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Down to 34.9˚F. Just took a short walk and minor stickage is happening just uphill from me (perhaps 100' higher). So hopefully soon IMBY.

You might pull something off up there, but this is moderating fast.

[Rubus Leucodermis]

3 minutes ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Down to 34.9˚F. Just took a short walk and minor stickage is happening just uphill from me (perhaps 100' higher). So hopefully soon IMBY.

And bam! Stickage now starting IMBY. 34.3˚F.

[Rubus Leucodermis]

3 minutes ago, snow_wizard said:

You might pull something off up there, but this is moderating fast.

Still thinking I have a good shot at a slushy inch or two.

[MR.SNOWMIZER]

Snow mixed with rain at home, 38 degrees.

[MossMan]

Sideways snow blowing in from the south at work! No stickage. 

[snow_wizard]

ECMWF has the exact same area of snow in king County Friday morning that is shown on the GFS.  Looks like a little bit of east wind helps with this.

[snow_wizard]

22 minutes ago, Rubus Leucodermis said:

Still thinking I have a good shot at a slushy inch or two.

It does look like Vancouver could hold onto the cold better than Bellingham has for a while.