Get Ready For June Gloom!

Sorry for the post hiatus folks! I just got back from a week-long trip with my folks to Cabo San Lucas and had a great time fishing, beach-combing, dancing, and eating all sorts of delicious food over there.

We’ve had a pleasant start to June, and the past two days have been simply exceptional! Yesterday, Portland hit a high of 86 degrees under mostly sunny skies thanks to a strong ridge of high pressure centered over the Intermountain West. This ridge moved further east overnight, allowing higher clouds to infiltrate the area, but we still managed to hit 78 degrees in the Rose City at 250 pm this afternoon.

But our sunny skies and warm temperatures will bid adieu tonight as a cold front moves through the area. Whether you wish to call it Juneuary, June Gloom, or something else altogether, models are in very good agreement that this incoming system will mark the beginning of an extended period of cool, cloudy, and rainy weather.

We’ll kick off our pattern change with a healthy dose of rain tonight as the front comes through. Expect 24-hour totals ranging from .25-.50 inches in the lowlands to 1-2 inches in the mountains. Plants will be happy.

After our initial surge of rain with this cold front, an upper-level low will drop over the area, bringing showers at times and keeping highs in the low 60s from Friday through Monday. We could catch a brief break from some of the action early next week as a weak ridge builds, but another trough looks to slide into the Pacific Northwest during the latter half of next week. Our soonest hope for a transition to warmer weather won’t occur until late next week, when a ridge may finally try to establish itself offshore and bring an end to our persistent troughiness.

I know this is the very last thing that most of you were hoping to hear. The winter of 2016-2017 was so cold and wet that most of us are anxious to hop straight into summer. But as the maps below show, we’ve been much warmer and drier than normal over the past two weeks, so we can’t get too greedy.

Our snowpack remains extremely healthy, and we may even add a little snow above 5-6000 feet from Thursday through Sunday. Prepare for some light snow if you are hiking above those elevations this weekend!

As a treat, here’s a timelapse of yesterday’s sunrise looking northeast from Skunk Bay on the northern tip of the Kitsap Peninsula towards Useless Bay on Whidbey Island. Credit goes to the one and only Greg Johnson of Skunk Bay Weather. Greg’s cams capture a variety of meteorological and astronomical phenomena in stunning high-definition… check out his majestic timelapse of the May 27/28, 2017 aurora!

I hope you can all make the best of our pattern change for the gloomier! I know our plants will.

Have a nice night,
Charlie