Image courtesy of the National Weather Service – Seattle
If you’re enjoying the unusual combination of summer-like temperatures and pumpkin spice lattes, you have another week of that ahead.
It’s kind of like the Queen and David Bowie song “Under Pressure”.
National Weather Service meteorologist, Kirby Cook, says we’ve had a pesky ridge of high pressure hanging out along the west coast. “That’s been driving very dry and unusually warm temperatures up and down the west coast, but especially here in the Pacific Northwest,” Cook says, “and it looks like it’s going to stay in place probably for the next 7 days or so. We’ll see an extension of the almost summer-like conditions into maybe even the middle part of October.”
Cook says winter will arrive eventually with a La Niña in the outlook expected to bring much cooler temperatures and with it the rain that should signal an end to wildfire season.
Cook says, for now, the warm, dry air will hang out, and that means not a lot of help for crews on the Bolt Creek Fire along Highway 2 or any other fires that spark in the Cascades.
What will help, Cook says, is the switch to an onshore flow happening overnight, which will bring moist air with it and will drive the smoke that’s hindered our air quality back up into the mountains.
