By Gordon McCraw, Meteorologist for the Tillamook County Pioneer
And today’s weather picture looks like this, we have a low pressure area spinning down off central California while a weak high pressure ridge builds over our area. What this means for us is a fair, mild, and dry day and tonight we can expect the low clouds and fog to return with light winds, and a low temperature near 41.
Tomorrow morning starts out cloudy and foggy, and the fog could be dense. With light winds, the fog will be slow to burn back leaving mostly cloudy skies. The fog returns by around sunset as the temperatures start to fall again, the afternoon high only near 53. With another fast moving cold front approaching, we see an increasing chance of rain starting that evening with rain likely tomorrow night, the winds becoming southerly 4-8, which helps to dissipate the fog, lows near 42.
The front pushes through around noon Friday bringing winds from the west at 10-15 gusting to 20, then we transition over to showers by the afternoon with the highs near 50. The scattered showers continue Friday night as the snow level falls to near 2500’, which is above the passes but will still put some snow in the higher Coast Range mountains, the overnight low is around 37. It looks like the front will bring somewhere between a quarter to three quarters of an inch of rain with this event, maybe an inch in the Coast Range.
It looks like a ridge tries to build on Saturday, so we see fewer showers, which is good as the snow level has dropped to around 2000’. The bad news is it appears another trough will race in and start to increase the rain chance later that night. High temperatures for Saturday are still near 50, lows down to near 34.
By Sunday it looks like we are in a zonal, or a flat west to east flow. This will provide an avenue for systems to get pushed in over our area through the holiday period and on into Tuesday. For the coast, we can expect cloudy, rainy days and cloudy, rainy, and cool nights with highs in the low 50s and lows in the upper 30s to low 40s. If you are headed east for the holidays, the Coast Range passes should be okay but east of that, travel through the Gorge and Hood River could see some travel impacts. If you are headed across the Cascades, it is very likely they will see some snow and/or freezing rain. It will be a period of, “Know Before You Go!” Look at tripcheck.com and weather.gov/Portland for all the latest weather and road information.