The Tale of Two Coasts

The tale of two coasts is that the West will be rocked my strong Pacific storms, that will dump feet upon feet of snow in the Cascade Mountains of Washington, Oregon, and even northern California the next few days. Heavy rain will be common from Medford, CA to Seattle, WA. We are getting our rain from a somewhat tropical system, infused with torrential downpours and severe storms that have produced many tornadoes all up and down the Plains. This will arrive tomorrow in a much weakened form with heavy rains associated with the frontal system that is a cold front, but with no cold air behind it as the wind will turn west and then eventually southwest on Monday, propelling temperatures into the low 80's by Monday afternoon, believe it or not! This will be a dominant feature for the next several to many days with a ridge in the East and trough in the West. A piece of cold air will move into parts of the Great Lakes and Northeast on Wednesday or Thursday of next week, but I think this will be a transient colder than normal airmass, which won't be all that cold with departures likely around -2 to -4 degrees. That would equivicate to the 50's for SNE, generally with 30's for lows, perhaps. This will only last for 2-3 days, maybe 4, and then I strongly feel that the warm air will surge right back into the Northeast and much of the Eastern United States for that matter.

The main pattern the next 1-2 weeks will be for a Ridge-East, Trough-West. Thats it; there will be minor swings from time to time where the East cools for a couple days and the West warms up for a couple of days, but the majority of the time will be the West being very cool and stormy with heavy mountain snows, and the East will have periods of frontal rains with heavy showers and thunder with temperatures above to much above normal. This pattern looks to last until at least Halloween. We will see, eventually, what November will bring in terms of patterns that set up. Winter forecasts look bad for snowlovers, at this point, but hopefully we can amend some of this as we get closer to November and winter forecasts come into better agreement. Forecasts made now are still too permature and preliminary to be seriously considered. But all the signs are there for an above normal temperature Winter and below normal snowfall winter season for 2007-8. We will see. This current pattern does not bode well for the future. Could it be foreshadowing the general pattern for our winter, which if it does, will be every bit as frustrating as the winters of 2001-2002 and 2006-2007.

I hope not. Until then, I'm going to KEEP THE FAITH and watch the Sox come back down 3-1 to advance to the World Series!