Maybe you were asleep (like me), or maybe the winds woke you up. Either way, there was a windstorm overnight, with the strongest winds in the South/Central Sound area, north of Everett, and in Eastern WA.
Peak gusts on the NWS map below don’t do the storm justice. Gusts of 45 and 48 mph were recorded in Federal Way and Bonney Lake, respectively.
Was this windstorm in the forecast?
Yes and no. In my previous blog post yesterday, I noted the potential for winds gusting 25-40 mph overnight. However, winds blew past the forecast (pun intended) and ended up gusting more on the scale of 30-50 mph.
Why did this windstorm occur?
As illustrated in the graphic below, a large ridge of high pressure sits offshore, and low pressure had formed in the Inland Northwest. Strong winds (black arrow) surged toward the low pressure overnight.
Where and when were the peak gusts?
We will examine two plots of data, from Federal Way and Bonney Lake.
Below, in the data from Federal Way, we see the peak gusts centered around 4 AM. The peak was 45 mph at 4:03 AM.
In the Bonney Lake data, the same trend is evident, with a peak gust of 48 mph at 4:09 AM.
Around 3:45-4:20 AM, we reached our lowest pressure and then pressure began to rise as the influence of the low pressure moved away.
Was there a lot of power outages?
No. Less than 500 PSE customers are out of power. This is likely due to the strong storm on January 13th doing lots of damage.
I’ll have an update later today on more upcoming weather, including more winds and colder temperatures.
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