This is a good time to charge up your electric car...particularly during the evenings.
The reason?
Unusually cool weather is forecast for the next few days in western Washington and Oregon. Seattle will be firmly into cool, marine air the next few days, with highs only reaching the LOWER 60s.
In contrast, it will remain warm over the Columbia Basin, with 80s for the first part of the week, climbing into the 90s by week's end.
This pattern is very favorable for producing healthy westerly winds along the eastern slopes of the Cascades and across the wind farms east of the Cascade crest.
Taken by Jeffrey Katz
The sea level pressure (solid lines), surface winds, and low-level temperature (colors) forecast for 2 PM Tuesday (below) show the story. High pressure and cool temperatures (green) offshore, warmer temperatures (orange and red colors) east of the Cascade Crest. You will notice a large pressure difference across the Cascades, which will produce strong winds over the east of the barrier.
A similar, but attenuated, version of this situation was in place today (Monday) and winds were gusting to 30-40 mph around Ellenburg and other eastern slope locations (see max gusts on Monday below).
Even stronger winds will occur on Tuesday and Wednesday. The result will be lots of wind energy generation. The Bonneville Power summary shows increasing wind generation the past few days (green line)...getting to roughly one-third of demand (red line). Will do even better tomorrow and Wednesday.
Wind energy generation in our region is unfortunately out of phase with demand. When we have mild temperatures--and little need for AC-- there is lots of wind energy. But when we really cook, wind energy is quite small since the westerly winds are absent then.
The cool temperatures in the west won't last forever. The latest forecast suggests that we will warm up to near-perfect temperatures in western Washington by next weekend.
And relatively toasty (upper 90s) over the Columbia Basin