Pacific Windstorm Will Hit The Pacific Northwest Late Thursday and Friday

Autumn began yesterday at 5 PM and the atmosphere has taken notice.

A significant midlatitude cyclone will cross the northern Oregon coast late Thursday and Friday morning, bringing strong winds and localized power outages.

Consider the UW WRF model forecast for Friday morning at 5 AM (sea level pressure and maximum wind gusts are shown below). 

Wow.  A very intense, but small, low-pressure center will make landfall on the northern Oregon Coast, with gusts up to 70 knots.   

 

Plotting the maximum wind gusts over time for this event (below) indicates the northern Oregon  Coast will get a direct hit with winds reaching 50 knots. 

This early in the season, this means power outages.

Other weather prediction systems are doing the same thing.   The excellent European Center model has a similar maximum wind swath. (The graphic below is in mph).  Seattle only gets some modest gusts.

The simulated satellite imagery for Thursday evening indicates an impressive system (the arrow points to the low center).  Looks like midwinter!

Precipitation totals from this system will be substantial, with the mountains and the coast getting several inches (see below).  Even eastern Washington gets substantial rain.  

All good for terminating the wildfire season and providing agriculture with a nice wetting rain.    Reservoirs will gain valuable water.

I am concerned about the lack of coastal wind warnings by the National Weather Service offices in Seattle and Portland (see their latest forecast graphics below).

They really need to have some kind of warning out for the northern Oregon coast.  

I could comment on issues with National Weather Service forecasts, but I will leave that to another time.

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Finally, someone emailed me about a good book on Northwest Weather.  Well, I do know one 😉

Link

Peak Bird Migration Reveals Gaps In Northwest Weather Radar

We are now at the peak of the bird migration season, and weather radar does a good job of tracking our feathered friends. 

The massive bird swarms over us now are a powerful tool for determining gaps in weather radar coverage.

Let's examine the regional radar imagery in more detail.

As some background, here are some weather radar-based bird migration statistics (from the Cornell BirdCast website).  Birds like to fly from sunset to sunrise, with a peak around midnight/

And we are nearly at the peak time of the year for the southward migration. 

At 5 PM yesterday, the combined radar image showed was just some local ground clutter.

The situation was very different at 9 PM, with the birds in flight (below).  The birds don't like to fly offshore. 

But over land, there are clearly major radar gaps, such as the southern  Oregon Coast, larger areas of north-central Washington, and much of eastern Washington.

Similar story around 3 AM today.

And this morning at 8 AM, the bird signal is gone, with just some ground returns.

The current weather radar locations are shown below with blue dots.   

 Suggested locations for new radars are shown by the red circles. Additional radars would be very helpful for weather prediction and other uses (e.g., wildfire management, flood warnings, and more).