Images of Trees during freezing rain events.

Images of Trees during freezing rain events. This is a Thursday morning update on tonight’s possible impactful system…

Models are, once again, all over the place on the freezing rain event.

During the last snow event, on Mon/Tues, the ECMWF (euro) was pretty much spot on. This long range model has the most funding and resources, but I’ll save that for another post.

We should start tonight with cold, light snow in the darkest hours. As the warm, moist, pacific storm moves into puget sound, the bitterly cold air looks to undercut the system, and at least 0.1 inch of freezing rain is expected in the early morning, and could linger longer. It could also get scoured out faster than the models are predicting, which would be a blessing for anyone traveling anywhere tomorrow AM.

In any case, it may be prudent to expect a number of issues across the island tomorrow. Particularly power outages, downed trees, and possibly black ice on the roads. Things will be variable and changing quickly however.

Thankfully, the freezing air will be exiting (at some point), and we should be warming to above freezing, with rain on snow/ice at some point tomorrow.

This should help mitigate any prolonged road issues, keeping impacts to a half day or so…

These ice storms are even more difficult to predict than sea level snow, there’s many variables that we just can’t predict with the supercomputer models and soundings.

I’m dedicating a bit of time today to stage the generator, do a bit of food prep, topping off the gas tanks, and grabbing some extra propane.

Maybe it’s all for nothing.. but freezing rain is not one to play around with. As seen in these examples.

Stay safe everyone!

Photos aren’t mine, and for educational purposes only 😇

#waice #icestorm #freezingrain #wawx #whidbeyisland #whidbeywx