A DRY JANUARY

Share with Friends

Long range forecasts remain in solid agreement that a very dry two week period has begun across California and in fact the entire West Coast.

All of this comes courtesy of a strong high pressure center locked over California, Washington and Oregon, while a cold trough brings frigid, snowy weather to the East.

And the outlook through mid-month (below) pretty much shows little change to that setup.

When it’s this dry we dig deeper into the various model ensemble members (individual runs with slightly different assumptions) to see if any of them see rain on the horizon.

Localized to Sonoma County Airport, this first graphic shows unanimous agreement among the 50 European members that rain won’t return before around the 18th (right hand side.) And even then only about a third of the members are on board.

Meantime, this graphic shows the same thing, in a different way, listing the various member’s guesses of the amount of rain by date, again zeroing in on Sonoma County Airport.

Only a few see a lot of rain (light gray lines), with the green line showing the mean of all of the ensemble members. Not much.

Eventually the models see the big high pressure center backing off to the northwest, allowing cooler air and perhaps a storm to slip in. But this isn’t forecast until sometime in the 3rd week of January.

If this happens we may see some cold storms drop in from the north late in the month. But at this point the models aren’t seeing anything major and they all suggest drier than average weather is very likely to continue through the third week of January.

More updates to come!