A Monster Low Will Develop on Wednesday

 I don't know what to call it.

The leviathan of lows?    The Whale Storm?   The Colossus of the eastern Pacific?

Whatever you call it, the largest midlatitude cyclone I can ever remember is about the form over the eastern Pacific.  Guinness record keepers should pay attention.

Below is the predicted sea level pressure map for Wednesday at 7 AM from the UW modeling system.

Just wow.    A deep low-pressure system of enormous dimensions, extending from Alaska to the latitude of Hawaii.   Roughly 2500 miles in diameter.


Strong winds will spread over thousands of miles as well (see the wind gust forecast below for the same time).


And with its large size and powerful winds over a huge area, this super low will produce immense, dangerous waves.

Consider the significant wave height prediction by the NOAA WaveWatch3 model.   The forecast for Tuesday evening predicts waves reaching 45 to 50 feet.  Extreme waves.


By Wednesday, the area of large waves greater than 25 ft expands and moves eastward, with some large swell reaching the West Coast.


And early Thursday, the Northwest will experience large waves breaking on our coastline (see below),


While all this is going on, California is in the midst of a once-in-a-decade wet/windy weather event.  I will talk about this more in future blogs, but the precipitation totals that are forecast for the next ten days are stunning (see below).   

Flooding from LA to northern California.  Off-the-charts snowfall. 

And some of the smaller dams will soon have to release large amounts of water to prevent them from being overtopped,


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Time of Year You Can See the Air Move

Image
  Most of the time, you can not see the air move.   You can feel it, but the complex, turbulent motions are invisible to you, except when it interacts with leaves and branches on trees and plants. But for a few weeks of the year, the sky is full of small, cotton-like tuffs that like a natural MRI machine reveals the complex three-dimensional motions of the atmosphere.   Cottonwood season.  And we right in the middle of it.   Being cottonwood aware is of particular value this year.  It reveals the active dispersion and movement of air that makes the outdoors essentially COVID safe, and thus should be of some comfort for those nervous about transmission outside. Cottonwood seeds are embedded in small cotton-like fibers.   A million seeds weigh about 3 pounds.  Yes, each seed and tuff weights about .000003 pounds.   And that fact, plus the cottonwood tuff, means that these seeds fall VERY, VERY, VERY slowly.   So slowly that they are excellent markers for the three-dimensional flow of the
Read more

Why so little lightning in the Pacific Northwest? And a very nice weekend ahead.

Image
During the past 24-hours, there have been a few lightning strokes over the region (see below) but nothing to write home about (see below). It turns out that the Pacific Northwest and the remainder of the West Coast have some of the lowest frequencies of thunderstorms in the entire country (see below). But why?    My podcast provides the answer. And I also give the weekend forecast....and I think most will like what I have to say. To listen to my podcast, use the link below or access it through your favorite podcast service. Some major podcast servers:     Like the podcast? Support on Patreon 
Read more

Strong Atmosphere River Heads into British Columbia and Southeast Alaska

Image
While the Northwest has been drier than normal, it has been drenching wet a few hundred miles to the north. An unusually strong atmospheric river ....a long current of moisture stretching southward to the subtropics...has been in place for days, bringing large amounts of water vapor to Alaska.   And the atmospheric river will be in place for several more days, slowly moving southward. To illustrate, the scale and beauty of the atmospheric river, here is a water vapor satellite image for 11 AM today. The lighter areas have more water vapor.  You can see the current of moisture extending from near Hawaii into central BC.  This current is the result of low pressure over the Gulf of Alaska and high pressure offshore of California.   A forecast of total water vapor content in the atmosphere for 11 PM tonight shows a healthy atmospheric river (white and blue colors indicate the higher amounts of moisture). As this atmospheric river slams into the mountainous West Coast, the air is forced to
Read more