Rain dies down this evening, returns by midday Thursday

After a dry morning, rain arrived as expected this afternoon. Add in the gusty east wind and it’s quite a “wintry afternoon” outside with temperatures only in the upper 30s and lower 40s.

The strong east wind continues through early tomorrow, then dies down. So far we’ve seen scattered gusts over 40 mph, but generally gusts 35-45 mph from the east don’t bring much damage since our trees are more accustomed to that wind direction in winter.

A strong storm well offshore is now dying a slow death as it moves towards the Pacific Northwest. The good news is that it’ll be quite weak as it moves up the coastline on Thursday and we’ll just see gusts from the south along the beaches up to 40-50 mph. Here in the valleys the current surge of rain moves out this evening and we’ll be quite a bit drier tonight through the Thursday morning commute. Then another surge of rain accompanies the main system as it passes by tomorrow midday & afternoon. The result is once again a drier morning but rainy afternoon.

A series of relatively weak weather systems continue to move onto the West Coast through the next week. Most of the wind and heavy rain stays south in California. That leaves us with lots of clouds and frequent showers or steady rain, but nothing heavy and NO totally dry days. Temperatures stay near or a little above normal.

The Cascades won’t see all that much snow through the next week because some of these systems are a bit warm-ish.

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