Heavy Mountain Snow This Week

Hi all! I hope everybody had a great weekend and enjoyed a rainy Sunday across the region. As damp and dreary as today has been, several even stronger storms will move through the area this week and will give us the classic trifecta of winter weather: wind, rain, and very heavy mountain snow.

If you take a look at the graphic below, you can see that there is currently an extremely strong jet stream over the Northern Pacific. This jet will move into the Pacific Northwest by Tuesday and send a series of storms through the region this week.

The first of these systems will make landfall Tuesday morning and bring periods of rain for much of the day before precipitation turns to showers Wednesday. Winter storm warnings for 1-2 feet of snow will almost certainly be issued for the Washington and Northern Oregon Cascades, and it will be a little blustery as well, particularly on the coast.

Another, stronger system will mainly take aim at Washington Wednesday night, and the storm’s trailing cold front is expected to stall over Washington on Thursday, delivering continued heavy rain and mountain snow. Another strong system will come through Friday morning, and this system has the potential to bring blustery winds into the Portland metro area as a surface low tracks to the NNE along the coast.

The Olympics/Washington Cascades and BC Coast Range will get absolutely hammered with snow this week, and I suspect most ski resorts in the Washington Cascades will have enough snow to open for limited operations by next week.

Yet another system is expected to move through over the weekend, and models keep next week wet, windy and snowy as well.

Storm season may have taken its sweet time getting started, but the Pacific storm train will be in full-force this week and snow will pile up in the mountains. I am so eager to get on the slopes… I hope you are all as excited for mountain snow as I am!

Charlie