LOCAL NEWS
Rainy weather and dark skies overtake Puget Sound for foreseeable future
Rain and dark skies landed in Western Washington on Wednesday, and marking the beginning of a lengthy, wet run of weather for the region.
Rain on the way for Western Washington
“Everything changes Wednesday morning as the first Pacific front reaches our coast,” said University of Washington climate scientist Cliff Mass in a recent blog post.
Rain and wind kicked in early Wednesday morning across the region, punctuated by 25 to 35 mile-per-hour gusts in “most spots around Western Washington from around early daybreak through early afternoon,” noted KIRO 7 meteorologist Nick Allard.
For Thursday, the National Weather Service expects winds to die down.
“Winds will be less than what was associated with Wednesday’s front,” the NWS described.
Even so, beach conditions along the coast will be hazardous through Thursday, with seas expected to build between 15 and 20 feet.
Lowlands will continue to see consistent rain at the end of the week and beyond.
We could make a fancy forecast graphic. Or we could sum it up in emojis!
Thursday: 🌧️
Friday: 🌧️
Saturday: 🌧️
Sunday: 🌧️
Monday: 🌧️
Tuesday: 🌧️#wawx— NWS Seattle (@NWSSeattle) October 17, 2019
“It’s official: The rainy season has begun,” said Seattle Weather Blog’s Justin Shaw on Twitter.
Mass agreed, calling Wednesday “just the warm up,” with rain is in the forecast every day for the next week in Seattle.
All this is fairly typical for the fall months, with October’s average rainfall in Seattle double what September gets. That said, the Puget Sound region’s most recent September was anything but normal.
Seattle saw 16 total days of measurable rainfall in September this year, the third most the city has ever had, and the most in over four decades. Bellingham saw its wettest September ever, with a new record of 4.73 inches of rainfall, breaking the previous 4.71-inch mark set in 1969. According to data cited by the Seattle Weather Blog, Seattle saw 3.32 inches of rain for the month, over twice the average for September of 1.5 inches.
Later on in 2019, we could see what Mass predicts will be a “very active winter” for Western Washington, spurred by an unusually early “Arctic express.”
