Snow Day
Actual snow falling in the Puget Sound is pretty rare. The combination of cold enough and wet enough at the same time is tricksy and unpredictable even when it might happen. If it's cold enough, usually that's because the air is clear as a bell and you can see the Pleiades at night. No snow. If it's wet enough, the cloud cover insulates against cold and we get rain. Even with practiced meteorologists running multiple forecast models, as often as not the warnings go out for snow and little or nothing comes of it. You get pretty skeptical about the warnings. But Sunday afternoon Hal was reading aloud to me from Cliff Mass's post on the predictive models for the incoming weather front:
As noted many times in this blog, the European Center has the best large scale forecasts and their large ensemble is considered the best. [...T]heir 51 ensemble forecasts...[v]irtually all go for snow, with some showing as much as 10-12 inches. The ensemble average ... is for about 8 inches (see panel below), with their single high resolution run, a bit more.
Pause. If I heard that right, it sounds like the most trusted models are predicting something like a minimum of 8 inches of snow. Says local weather god, Cliff Mass. Well, okay then.
I needed to pick up dog treats and bread for the week anyway, so we turned it into a more serious shopping run and hit both Trader Joe's and Fred Meyer and laid in Serious Supplies. By the time we'd run the errands, the rain had turned to sleet and then full on snow, though it wasn't sticking yet. By the time I'd unpacked the groceries snow was accumulating, and we saw about two inches pile up in the next hour. Somewhere in there we decided to make dinner at home and watch streaming movies rather than go out to dinner and the cinema. Retrospectively, a wise choice. The local weather nerd, er, Weather Underground station, reported our neighborhood got 7.5" overnight. Not much by Midwest standards, but the Midwest doesn't have our 12% grade hills. Accumulation varied a lot -- North Seattle weighed in at only 1.5", some parts of the East Side got literally ten times as much. Elevation matters.
We never lost power except for flickers, so we had heat, internet, and plenty of food, Mondays are Hal's weekend, and my office was closed for weather, so it was about as pleasant and low key a snow day as you could wish for.
Only today, after a whole day of semi-tropical rain squalls yesterday, are the last patches of snow melted. Now we have mud and flooding instead. Far less picturesque.