SEATTLE -- A giant glowing orb in the sky for hours and hours on end. Short sleeves, shorts and flip-flops catch your eye all over your daily routine. The snow-covered mountains will be popping all afternoon under nearly perfectly blue skies. You don't need to check your calendar -- it IS still April. But, we are seeing some incredibly unusual weather for the Pacific Northwest today.
It started with a ridge of high pressure that's moved into our area. It's incredibly strong and very mild. "Once in a while, I see something that is truly amazing," said University of Washington Atmospheric Sciences Professor Dr. Cliff Mass in his blog. "It's happened today. " He calls attention to a diagram that shows something pretty unusual happening about 5,000 feet above us in Western Washington. An unusually warm air mass, something we've never seen this early in the year. He knows this from this morning's weather balloon sounding. Twice daily, weather stations all across the country release weather balloons that carry devices called radiosondes. They send back all sorts of data about what's going on in real-time about what's happening in the atmosphere. "Here is a plot of the climatology of temperatures at the Quillayute, Washington radiosonde site, specifically, the temperature at 850 hPa, around 5000 ft. Today's temperature is shown by the silver dot. The red line shows the daily records, the black line is the average. The temperature observed today (16.5C) is the warmest ever observed for ANY DATE between January 1 and April 24th."
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Q13 FOX Forecast
Q13 FOX Forecast
A graph of the roughly 5000 ft layer of the atmosphere above Western Washington. The dot is today, way outside of anything close to the normal or records for this time of year.
And this ridge of high pressure that's ushering in this warmer air mass, also naturally delivers a occurring clockwise flow which means N/NE winds to our region. That's a downslope warming wind that could increase the temperatures down to the Earth's surface where we all live to some record-setting April warmth.
We could set records for many cities in Washington State: Seattle, Olympia, Quillayute/Forks, Hoquiam, and perhaps Bellingham. And in cities all across Western Oregon: Portland, Salem, Eugene, Newport and Medford all could hit record highs. Even some spots in California are just baking in this warm weather.
The number to beat at SeaTac Int'l Airport today is 78 and the Q13 News forecast is calling for 81. But, some computer generated forecast models are going for even hotter, like mid-80s. Others only have us in the 70s. "It's a one-day-wonder," says Q13 Lead Morning Meteorologist MJ McDermott says spring heat waves are hard to forecast. "Just because a computer sees something, doesn't mean you always run with it. It's an unstable time of year and things happen so quickly. So, we'll see. It could be very exciting if we get that warm."
High pressure ridge delivering record heat to much of the NW.
And if we do get to 80s in a few places, most notably in our region: Olympia and Hoquiam, it's a new kind of record. This could be the earliest in the year those cities have EVER had an 80 degree temperature. Seattle's earliest ever 80 degree temp was April 1st, set way back in the 1953 when Dwight Eisenhower was in the White House.
If you're not a fan of the heat, take some comfort that we cool off quickly typically this time of year when the sun goes down. And while we're really warm for April, this would be average for roughly mid-June. Overnight lows won't be in the 60s where you can't get restful sleep at night. Lows will likely be mild and near the very pleasant 50 degree mark ("Good sleepin' weather," says M.J.). And the forecast models agree, we'll likely be down in the more comfortable 70s tomorrow. Though the number to beat tomorrow at SeaTac is 70 degrees.
But that's another story...