‘Zombie summer’ returns: Seattle weather forecast calls for mid-70s before rain comes back this weekend
Oct 14, 2026, 10:10 AM
A tree is seen along Lake Washington during autumn in Seattle. (Photo courtesy of Envato)
(Photo courtesy of Envato)
Just when it looked like summer was finally over, it’s back again. Seattle is getting one more round of warm, sunny weather this week. Highs should be near 70 on Thursday and in the mid-70s on Friday across the Puget Sound region.
Meteorologist Scott Sistek of the Emerald City Weather Blog calls it “zombie summer” in his latest forecast post.
“I called it zombie summer because it felt like a couple times already this late summer and fall that we’ve had our high temperature of like, it’s 77, ‘OK, this has got to be the last day it’s going to be warm here,'” Sistek said when he joined KIRO Newsradio’s “Seattle’s Morning News” on Wednesday. “And then it cools off, we get the rain. Then it happens again.”
Seattle has been fooled more than once. The city hit 78 on Sept. 9 and 77 on Sept. 17, and both times it looked like summer’s last gasp. October then opened with eight straight days at 66 degrees or warmer. Last week it looked like western Washington had traded the 70s for cooler weather for good.
“It’s not ‘heat heat,’ but by October standards, it’s going to be pretty warm here tomorrow and Friday,” Sistek said. “So it feels like ‘here comes summer once again.’ It’s like the summer we can’t get rid of.”
Why is Seattle so warm in October?
Sistek said the warm-up comes from the same setup behind a lot of Seattle’s summer heat. A ridge of high pressure builds over the West Coast and flips the usual wind direction.
“The weather pattern sets up where we get an easterly wind instead of, like, our cooling winds off the ocean; the wind comes backward,” Sistek said. “It comes in from Eastern Washington, so it’s a drier, warmer wind. It sinks when it comes down the Cascades, that warms it up a little more.”
You’ll feel that wind in the foothills. Sistek expects gusts of 20 to 35 mph there. That’s breezy but not strong enough to cause damage.
The good news is that it means a couple of beautiful fall days.
“Sunny and 75, we’ll take that pretty much any day. Maybe not Christmas, but sunny and 75 for most days, that’s great,” Sistek said. “I think it’s kind of like a nice little autumn break, if you will, for like two days.”
Will Seattle break a heat record this week?
Seattle won’t break a record this week. The record high for Friday’s date is 88 degrees, set on Oct. 16, 2022. That’s also the latest 80-degree day ever recorded in Seattle, and Sistek said it beat the old records for that time of year by 10 to 12 degrees.
“It’s not going to be 88 tomorrow or Friday, so it takes away the record-breaking time,” Sistek said. “But had this been on the 17th or 18th, it would have been a record breaker.”
On his blog, Sistek points out that the record highs for Oct. 17 through 19 are only in the low 70s. If this warm spell had shown up a day or two later, Seattle would have been in record territory.
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When will rain return to Seattle?
Rain fans, you don’t have long to wait. A weak front moves in Saturday, bringing a few light showers and dropping highs back to the low 60s. After that, Sistek expects a pretty typical Seattle week.
“Next week, it’s cool, it’s showery, not stormy, but just kind of, you know, off-and-on Seattle rain, and back into the 50s for highs, like late October is supposed to be, and mostly gray over blue as far as the sky color goes,” Sistek said.
It’s been a dry start to the month. Sistek said it rained on only two of the first 13 days of October, for a total of 0.06 inches. That’s unusual, but it’s not a record. Sistek found six years when Seattle went the first 13 days of October with no rain at all, most recently in 1991.
What the Super El Niño means for Seattle’s winter and mountain snow
Sistek first flagged a record-breaking El Niño back in May, and he said it keeps getting stronger.
“The record was about 2.7° Celsius above average for the sea water temperatures. We’re looking at maybe hitting up to upper 3s to maybe even 4° this year,” Sistek said. “So we are still blowing past all records.”
You can already see El Niño’s effects elsewhere. Sistek pointed to an unusually busy hurricane season in the Pacific, where forecasters had warned of more active Pacific storms. California has already been hit a few times by the remnants of tropical storms.
In western Washington, Sistek expects the biggest impacts around December and January, a timeline he first laid out in September. He said it’ll look a lot like the first two weeks of October, repeated through the rest of fall and winter: long stretches that are warmer and drier than normal. That’s bad news for the mountains.
“It’s going to be tough to get snow in the mountains. As long as it’s warm, it’s hard to snow up there,” Sistek said.
He said California is bracing for a very wet winter, while the Northwest could have the opposite problem.
“For us, it may end up being kind of a snoozer winter, and that’s not good for us either, but in a different way,” Sistek said. “It may not be that it’s so stormy; it’s like, ‘Where are the storms?'”
