Welcome to summer in the Pacific NW. We are going to have a slightly warm Saturday and a cooler Sunday, with still no rain in sight. Again, compared to the rest of the country, we are so lucky. If you look at the big picture we have the fifth named storm in the Atlantic (Don) and the third named hurricane (Calvin) in the Pacific. As Calvin weakens on its path to the West it does have the potential to impact the Big Island of Hawaii with rain and some wind just not of hurricane force. For this early in the season, that’s a bunch of named storms, and conditions in both oceans favor more storm development.
If today’s Brief sounds familiar, it should because our situation hasn’t changed very much. Today’s sat pic does show an interesting new development with smoke from the BC wildfires just north of Idaho and starting to flow into Montana, this will increase over the next couple of days however it will not impact the Salish Sea, yet.
We still have a very weak and unstable high-pressure system off the California coast with a ridge of high-pressure building along our coast. We also have a very weak low-pressure system (1010MB) with an attached cold front due west of us however this will degrade as it hits the ridge and the coastal buffer zone. By Sunday the low will have drifted to the north and the cold front will have drifted slowly towards the coast.
For the local area, boaters can expect light wind in most of the waters until the onshore breeze fills down the Strait of JdF. This will result in small craft advisories and potentially gale warnings for the Central and Eastern Straits for both Saturday and Sunday. Exercise caution if transiting those areas.
Enjoy the weekend and as if the Chamber of Commerce weather we had for the All-Star Game wasn’t bad enough, don’t tell your friends in the rest of the country what we have going for us out here now!
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)