Seattle and Weather Disasters. We Can Do Better Than Los Angeles and New Orleans!

Weather prediction has become far more skillful in recent decades, with nearly all major regional weather/climate threats accurately predicted days in advance.  

Unfortunately, several major cities have not taken advantage of the profoundly more skillful forecasts, resulting in unnecessarily severe loss of life and property.

For example, Los Angeles experienced immense damage and many deaths from the 2025 wildfires, the result of a well-forecast Santa Ana wind event.

Los Angeles, January 2025

Thousands died in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina, whose track was skillfully forecast several days before.

Seattle was caught unprepared for a well-predicted snowstorm in 2008, leading to a crippled city and the mayor being kicked out of office.  In 2022, the region was not prepared for a well-forecast freezing rainstorm.

I just published a paper on the topic: Excellent Forecasts but Poor Outcomes: Why Can’t We Do Better?

Seattle and the vicinity are vulnerable to well-forecast environmental threats, such as:

• Windstorms associated with Pacific cyclones
• Downslope windstorms descending the Cascades
• Snowstorms
• Ice storms 
• Wildfire smoke
• Coldwaves 
• Heatwaves
• Heavy rain and flooding

To deal with all these threats, Seattle should create an ENVIRONMENTAL WARNING SYSTEM.  

A system that would monitor the potential for such threats, provide online forecasts of their impacts, and push critical, site-specific information out to smartphones and other devices.

Here is a sample of what I am thinking of:

You could monitor on your mobile device or computer, or request a notification when a meteorological threat looms.  You could receive warnings and recommendations for personal actions to save lives or property.

Since your device knows your location, information and warnings could be specific to your position.

Some of you may know that the UW has already built components of such a system.   For example, there is Seattle SnowWatch:

And Seattle WindWatch:

To build a comprehensive environmental monitoring and forecasting system for Seattle, King County, or other locations is quite possible and could save many lives and prevent property damage.

If heavy rains were expected at your location, you could attend to drains and gutters, avoid sleeping in the basement, and evacuate potentially flooded areas.   Cities could bring in staff to clear drains.  

For cold waves, homeless folks could be required to move inside (there have been too many deaths in Seattle from exposure in the past several years).    For strong wind events, folks could avoid sleeping when trees could fall and prepare for outages.  City Light could pre-position crews and resources.

You get the idea. 

With highly skillful and site-specific warnings, society could make better decisions and greatly reduce the impacts of strong local weather events.  The number of people injured or killed by severe weather could be greatly reduced with the proper application of the amazing forecast skill available today.

Western Washington and Oregon Wildfires are Most Frequent This Time of the Year: Should We Worry?

Climatologically, the most costly meteorological disaster west of the Cascade crest occurs at this time of the year:  massive wildfires associated with strong easterly winds.

Here is a map of the big ones through 2020

And here are their dates, areas, and direct fatalities.  Late August and early September are the favored times.

Why late summer?    

One reason is that surface fuels are relatively dry after our warm, near-rainless summer.  But even more important, early September is a period when western Washington and Oregon can experience very strong, very dry easterly winds.

It is really hard to get big fires in the west when cool, moist air floods western Oregon and Washington.  Strong easterly winds (from the east) are very dry, starting in eastern Oregon and Washington.  They dry even more as they descend the western slopes of the Cascades.

During the late summer and early fall, high pressure can build inland (associated with cold, dense air moving southward out of Canada).   See example below.

With high pressure inland and lower pressure along the coast, offshore-directed easterly winds develop, as illustrated by the winds at 850 hPa (about 5000 ft) at the same time.

These easterly winds, and the accompanying dry air, can start and maintain fires, such as the huge Labor Day fires of 2020.

I know your next question: will this happen this year?  

I have very good news.  It has not happened yet, and model forecasts do not suggest that this pattern will set up during the next two weeks.   After that, the threat declines rapidly.

To show this, here is the forecast for meteorological conditions at Stampede Pass in the central Cascades.  No strong easterly wind periods.  Other mountain sites are similar.

Major fires on the western side of the Northwest can easily run into the billions of dollars and result in many injuries and deaths.

What about climate change?  Will that make such fires more frequent?  

Published research (some done by my group) has found that global warming will cause a DECLINE in widespread wildfires.

That is not a typo.  A DECLINE. 

Why?  Because global warming preferentially warms the interior of the continent, with the less dense, warmer air weakening the interior high pressure that drives easterly flow

Announcement

I will be teaching Atmospheric Sciences 101 this autumn if anyone is interested.  It provides a good general intro to meteorology and weather prediction.  It will be hybrid, both in person (MUCH, MUCH BETTER) and online.  Information is found here: 

https://a.atmos.washington.edu/~cliff/ATMS101Y2026.html