Historic Coastal Snow Storm

What a wild few days of weather it has been! Lets start off with the wind.

Early Monday morning a deep low pressure rapidly developed and gave the coastal areas and some valley locations very strong winds.

The image below is a water vapor satellite image of the low

  Here are some of the peak gusts recorded

- Pacific City (87mph)
- Garibaldi (82mph)
- Cape Foulweather (81mph)
- Clatsop Spit (81mph)
- Lincoln City (77mph)
- Cape Disappointment (75mph)
- Cannon Beach (65mph)
- Ocean Park (56mph)
- Salem (56mph)
- Eugene (51mph)
- Portland (49mph)
- Kelso (43mph)

Later on in the day the cold front passed the coast and started to drop the temperatures. Pretty quickly the rain began to turn to snow and stick. Meanwhile here in the Portland area we were getting heavy rain.

In the evening something almost unheard of  happened, Lincoln city was getting dumped on with snow meanwhile Government camp was getting rain

Here are the ODOT images taken at the same time.

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Now what caused this phenomenon to happen? 

This was caused by a cold front stalling out just to the east of the Portland area and providing lots of moisture to the whole area, but the cold front stalling just to the east of the metro area caused the cold air at the coast  not to be pulled in to our area until later when the front began moving again..

The image below shows the location of where the front stalled out (blue barbed line)

In fact so much snow fell on the cost that it will be one that goes down in the record books

So how much snow did fall?

Coast:

Tillamook: 8.5 inches

Newport: 6.0 inches

Waldport: 6.0 inches

Florence: 5.0 inches

Valley:

Happy Valley: 5.0 inches

Boring: 4.0 inches

Camas: 2.0 inches

Milwukie: 1.2 inches

 Salem: 1.0 inch

SE Portland: 1.0 inch

Forecast:

The next several days are just going to be very wet, models are showing the jet stream taking aim directly at us and bringing us lots of moisture.

The image below is the NOGAPS model showing the jet stream on Thursday

On Saturday and Sunday another cold batch of air will come down, now snow is not looking likely due to the lack of precipitation with this cold air.

 The image below shows the jet stream buckling and allowing the cold air to come down 

My forecast:

Thanks for reading

-Michael