What? More snow? Well Maybe...

UPDATE: Latest UW model runs go back to "normal" with just heavy snow over the mountains and not the lowlands. Maybe some rain/snow mix showers in the morning, then just plain ole rain for tomorrow. Have a good night!

Ok folks here's the deal. There is a lot of uncertainty in this but this morning, the UW model runs came out with an "interesting picture" of some possible snowfall coming tomorrow morning. One of my professors at the university, Cliff Mass, wrote a blog about this earlier today and I would completely agree with him. This morning's run's painted a few inches of snow over a lot of Western Washington tomorrow morning.

This is 24hr snowfall totals ending 4pm Monday. Woah. There would be some Olympic "snow" shadowing again this time North and West of Seattle with heavier snowfall East of Seattle and South West. Now I don't want to send you into a panic because the previous model run showed this.

Just a few scattered snow showers South and East of Seattle. Maybe a little towards the Oregon coast too. This doesn't boast well for confidence in the event. Now UW runs the atmospheric models twice a day, morning and evening. So if this evenings model runs show a similar gruesome picture, tomorrow mornings commute could be hellish. Now one thing to be clear of, it will be plenty warm tomorrow so whatever falls tomorrow will likely melt. But that won't help with traffic and anything that sticks to roads could make driving to work a nightmare. I will update this post later tonight.

In the meantime, I will also say our "large" snow chances are dwindling this week. We have warmer temperatures, more Southwesterly flow aloft (bringing warmer air and not from Canada), and some systems moving in this week. However, these are not weak systems. Even the cold front moving through today will bring some outrageous snow totals to the mountains. The two pictures above showed nearly 3feet of snow over a 24hr period for many locations up in the Cascades. Travel over the passes this Monday and Tuesday could be very treacherous. In addition to that, a storm moving in Wednesday could bring in some very strong winds to the interior of Western Washington. Here is a surface map of the afore mentioned storm.

When you see those black lines are piled up together real close, that spells wind. Those lines are called isobars, lines of equal pressure in the atmosphere. Wind tends to flow from higher to lower pressure and the closer those lines are together, the stronger the winds. This could be a "significant" wind storm especially since the grounds are very saturated after the snow and the rain we've been dealing with. Here is a picture of the model forecasted winds for Wednesday (when the storm is expected to arrive)

Significant winds on the coast, out in the Pacific that black represents 45knot SUSTAINED winds. Yikes. In West. WA sustained winds forecasted in the 20-30knot range. You can roughly estimate gusts by multiplying the sustained winds by 1.5. In this case, gusts in the 35-45mph range. This may not seem significant but small microscale phenomenom can bring these gusts up even more and the soil isn't very strong at the moment because it is so saturated. This will need to be monitored for some damage certainly possible. Very strong winds along the Strait and into the San Juan islands. 

I hope this satisfies some of your hunger for weather info (It does for me :) ) and i'll be sure to update you on the snow situation later tonight. Or you can find me on Twitter: @huskyAaron and follow tweets about tonight.