Summer’s not over yet, but it’ll be wet and cool this weekend

For anyone who has ever called the wet and cool weather the greater Seattle area often sees early in the summer months “June-uary,” then the name “August-ober” would fit the weather pattern the Puget Sound region is seeing now.

“It’s definitely cool and much wetter than it has been, and we’ll see that persist, certainly through the weekend, especially through Saturday morning,” National Weather Service meteorologist Kirby Cook told KIRO Newsradio. “The weather is unusually wet with widespread rain, maybe even some thunderstorms in the higher terrain cascades, but definitely wetter than normal for this time of year, and cooler than normal.”

Over the next day or so, the cascades of King County, Snohomish County, Skagit County, and Whatcom County could see as much as two inches of rain in some spots.

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Cook said we should get a bit of a break on Sunday.

“Certainly drier, but still cool, and then maybe another little shot at some precipitation Monday,” Cook said.

We should see sunnier skies and a bit of a warmup by midweek.

“Wednesday onward, we’re back up around normal,” Cook explained.

Wet weather in August isn’t unusual

He said it’s not unusual to get some wet weather in August.

“Anytime we get beyond the end of July, we start to cool off, and you can start to see early systems like this, seasonal systems like this, as we get into September,” Cook explained. “So, it’s not unusual, but we’ve definitely been cooler and wetter than normal.”

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The rain is helping douse the wildfires across Washington.

“Those kind of amounts are almost fall type precipitation amounts, and that will definitely act as a wetting rain for a lot of the fires in the Cascades on on the east side too,” Cook said to KIRO Newsradio. “The only challenge with that is, of course, any of those new burn scars or pre existing burn scars, we want to keep an eye on heavier precipitation amounts here, because that can drive impacts associated with debris flows and landslides. If we get enough precipitation, even heavier amounts over shorter periods of time, can drive those kind of impacts.”

Temperatures will be back in the mid-70s next week with sunshine in the afternoon. “And so summer’s not done yet,” Cook said.

It was a particularly chilly August day on Friday

In a report distributed late Friday, KIRO 7 Chief Meteorologist Morgan Palmer wrote that Seattle saw a temperature it hadn’t seen in over a decade Friday.

The “official” high temperature for Seattle will go down as 59 degrees Friday, “which tied the record low maximum temperature for the date and was the coldest daytime high temperature since 59 degrees for a high back on Aug. 31, 2010,” Palmer wrote. He added that while it was 61 degrees in the midnight hour Friday morning, official records are kept in Standard Time, which at this time of year is 1 a.m. to 1 a.m.

Going further, Friday was only the 10th time in 80 years of records Seattle had an August day with a high under 60 degrees, the National Weather Service Seattle stated in an X post.

Contributing: Heather Bosch, KIRO Newsradio; Steve Coogan, MyNorthwest

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X here and email him here.