A Potential Intense Feature Moving Through Tonight. My New Podcast. And Why are Northwest Summers so Dry.

A potentially VERY intense frontal feature will move through western Washington tonight, one that could produce intense rainfall and localized urban flooding.

A very strong front will move through this evening, crossing Puget Sound sometime between 8 PM and 11 PM. This front will bring INTENSE, heavy rain for a short period (less than an hour) that will cause localized flooding and strong winds. There could be a thunderstorm with it.

To illustrate this threat, here is a simulated radar image for 10 PM tonight. Wow. The orange/red colors indicate very heavy rainfall. The NOAA HRRR model is doing the same thing.

This feature will pass through the coast a few hours earlier.

I would not be driving during this event and if you live in a basement apartment with flooding issues, I would be watchful. The City of Seattle used to have the RainWatch system that provided warning capabilities for such events, but since they dropped it a few years ago, I am providing the heads-up manually.

The total precipitation for the storm follows the previous guidance (the total through 5 AM Sunday is shown below). Even eastern WA gets good rain, with over 5 inches in portions of the Olympics and Cas Cascades.

In western Washington, the rain will be very heavy tonight, with showers into Sunday. Good chance of thunderstorms on Saturday and Sunday.

I talk about the forecast in-depth in my podcast.

In the second section of the podcast, I explain why the Northwest has some of the driest summers in the nation. In fact, the entire West Coast is very dry (the plot below shows you the average July precipitation). By the end of the podcast, you will know the reason.