The ‘Gales of November’ have arrived in the Pacific Northwest

Typically the phrase “Gales of November” refers to strong low pressure systems moving across the Great Lakes in late autumn (right now). One of those storms famously sunk the Edmund Fitzgerald; many of you know the Gordon Lightfoot tune about that sinking on November 10th, 1975.

But the Eastern Pacific is often raked by powerful storms in November too so I figure the phrase works well enough. This is the beginning of the “winter” storm season on the Pacific Northwest coastline. In fact this Friday is the 45th anniversary of the “Friday the 13th” storm, one of the “big 3″ wind storms that brought widespread destruction in the 2nd half of the 20th century.

Do we have any “big storms” ahead? Social media would have made you think so in the past week...but...well...that’s social media for you. NO, we don’t have a powerful storm on the way for at least a week. But we DO have some very warm temperatures on tap the next few days.

KEY POINTS

• Rain falls off/on over the next 10 days, although Wednesday and Thursday will be dry this week. Pretty typical November stuff.
• There’s no sign of flooding or an atmospheric river of any consequence in SW Washington or Oregon in the next week. Most likely the I-5 corridor picks up less than 2″ rain in the next week.
• WARM! An atmospheric river (pineapple express) is aimed at northern Washington and BC the next few days. We will be on the southern side.
• Temperatures may reach 70 in the Willamette Valley Wednesday, and INTO the 70s in Central Oregon Wednesday and Thursday.
• Strong wind buffets the coastline at times in the next week, but gusts likely remain below 60mph. I’m watching late Friday and Saturday closely to see if gusts may go higher than that out there.

We did get a bit of a surprisingly strong west wind late Saturday evening. Wind gusts reached 30-40 mph as a cold front moved through the region. We were at the tail end of the strong wind that struck western Washington.

WHAT’S AHEAD

Mid-late last week, it appeared that we’d be under a strong westerly jet stream this week with numerous very wet systems moving into the Pacific Northwest. The potential for some sort of windstorm was there as well. Instead, the “El Niño pattern” is showing once again; some energy is splitting off from these systems and heading toward California. You can see it real clearly on Thursday morning’s 500mb vorticity chart.

See that 2nd area of vorticity off the California coastline has broken off from the main flow up north? This tends to weaken powerful storms and their associated warm/cold/occluded fronts as they head toward the West Coast. We still get plenty of rain in this pattern, but not the powerful storms or flooding events. It’s just as “messed up” looking on Tuesday the 17th from the EURO-AI midday model run; quite splitty.

At one point we thought we’d see heavy rain tomorrow and Wednesday due to us being right under a strong jet stream. Instead, with energy digging away from us, we’re left with almost no rain until Friday and we’ll be on the warm side of the jet stream.

Now this doesn’t mean that we won’t have real stormy weather later in November or this winter of course. It just means that for now we’re in a “rainy and breezy” weather pattern, not a big stormy period.

When we are watching deep areas of low pressure in the storm season, we’re often watching the “danger zone” between the coastline and 130W longitude.

Two deep lows will spin up later this week; but are forecast to remain outside of that zone.

One on Friday...

Then another Saturday night.

The strong wind with these storms WILL be generating a large swell that will impact the West Coast later in the week too. I’ve already seen 3 videos of people getting caught in this past weekend’s big waves. Too close! Check out the wave height forecast from the ECMWF model for later Friday; a repeat of what we just saw yesterday.

That’s it for this evening, enjoy the warmth outside this week, you know it’ll soon be chilly enough in December and January...Mark

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