It’s going to be a perfect weekend to go to the Seattle Boat Show without ever leaving the house!
Right now things are fairly calm however as you can see from the surface charts, satelite pics, and the Doppler Radar we have a strong frontal system approaching the coast which should arrive late tonight or early Saturday morning. This will bring fairly strong SSE winds to the north end of Admiralty Inlet, the eastern part of the Straits of JdF, and the San Juan Islands. This breeze will begin to ease by about mid-morning however showers will continue through the weekend. This will be just a practice run as another front will arrive late Saturday or early Sunday.
February 1 Surface Forecast 
February 2 500 mb 
February 2 Surface Forecast 
January 29 500 mb 
January 29 Surface Forecast 
January 30 Surface Forecast 
January 31 500 mb 
January 31 Surface Forecast
You should also take a look at the 31 Jan surface forecast chart and note that in the western Pacific the ice accretion line is almost as far south as 40° N. Combine this with the winds that are expected and you’ve got a pretty good reason to stay in port. The fact that this line is so far south is almost certainly the result of a very cold dome of high pressure that when it was over Mongolia in late December/early January set a new record for the highest pressure ever recorded. This occurred at Tsetsen-Uul, Mongolia where the mean sea-level pressure reached 1094.3mb. And we thought that when the high in western Canada got to 1049mb that that was high! The record for the contiguous-US is 1064mb which occurred in Miles City, Montana in December of 1983. If you include Alaska, the record is 1078.8mb which was set in Northway, Alaska in late January of 1989.
Water Vapor Image 
Satellite 
Doppler
Today’s 500mb chart shows the upper-level low-pressure system off of southern California that brought the rain and high winds into that area earlier this week with the jet stream coming ashore near the US-Mexican border which is way south of where it normally comes ashore somewhere between Oregon and Sitka. As you look at the 96hr 500mb forecast chart you’ll notice that it doesn’t move very much further north which will mean that California will get more rain and the Sierra Nevada’s will get a lot more snow. This will be a very interesting week of weather.
Enjoy the weekend, go to the Boat Show (Seattle Boat Show Connected – Start Online. End Up On The Water.), and have a great time.
Bruce has raced and cruised the Pacific Northwest his entire life. He earned a Bachelor’s of Science from the University of Washington in Biological Oceanography and learned meteorology “to keep from getting kicked around on the race course.” Bruce spent nearly two decades as Associate Publisher for Northwest Yachting Magazine, retiring in mid-2015, and was the chairman of the board of trustees for the Northwest Marine Trade Association in 2014. (photo of Bruce driving Playstation is a bit dated, but cool)