Friday and Saturday were breezy and occasionally rainy, as forecast. Take a look at 48 hour rain totals ending 9 PM Saturday.
More rain is expected through the next few days. The forecast for Puyallup from Weather Underground shows expected conditions and rain accumulations.
Showers moving along the outside of a ridge will impact the area on Sunday and Monday. Expect a break Tuesday, then another system arrives for late Tuesday to early Thursday. At least a few days of drier and sunnier weather are possible beginning on Friday!
Now...to something interesting that occurred on Friday. A relatively deep low pressure system (by March standards) was offshore, and it kept pushing showers onshore. The setup is illustrated below.
Due to instability in the atmosphere (cold temperatures aloft plus heating at the surface) these showers were convective and featured thunder, lightning, and some rotation. Three strong rotating showers moved onshore on the North WA Coast on Friday morning, prompting rare Tornado Warnings.
Below is a radar image showing one of these storm cells moving onshore between Forks and La Push.
The thin red outline denotes a Tornado Warning. The orange outline is a Special Marine Warning, the marine equivalent of a Severe Thunderstorm Warning, (over 15 of these were issued off the WA/OR coasts on Friday due to strong thunderstorms). The circled area on the radar shows rotation and heavy rain.
Is this rare for Washington? Yes and no. Convective showers on the coast aren’t especially rare, but rotating convective showers with potential tornadoes and strong thunderstorms offshore are rare. We don’t see these warnings issued often around our area.
No tornadoes have been confirmed as of the writing of this blog, but it’s interesting to see some tornado warnings in our neck of the woods.
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