Christmas Eve wind advisory canceled for Snohomish County
Published 11:50 am Tuesday, December 23, 2025
EVERETT — A fierce windstorm previously predicted for Wednesday will likely not come to fruition on Christmas Eve, meteorologists said.
After previously issuing a high wind warning for possible gusts of up to 50-60 mph Wednesday, the National Weather Service downgraded that to a wind advisory on Wednesday morning before canceling the advisory entirely around noon that day.
The advisory was in effect for areas including Everett, Marysville, Lake Stevens and Snohomish from 1 p.m. through 7 p.m. Wednesday.
In the Puget Sound region, wind-producing storms typically come from the direction of the ocean, blowing from the southwest to the northeast, said Maddie Kristell, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Seattle. But the storm forecasted for Wednesday was projected to come up from the south, and there was a considerable amount of uncertainty in the models as to how it was going to pan out, even less than 24 hours before it was set to arrive, she said Wednesday.
“But the potential was there, and we had a wide array of model solutions suggesting at the time that it would be capable of high wind warning criteria,” Kristell said.
By Wednesday morning, models had shown that the storm was less indicative of high winds.
The projected windstorm was set to be caused by two low-pressure systems — areas of low air pressure that has converging winds — one near the surface, and one in the higher levels of the atmosphere. That combination usually makes storms stronger, Kristell said. But in this case, the low-pressure system near the surface likely moved faster than the one higher in the atmosphere.
“It kind of decoupled, in a sense,” she said. “It wasn’t one of those situations where it had both surface level and upper-atmospheric support. It just moved ahead of it and weakened.”
National Weather Service projections show it will likely rain on Christmas Day. Temperatures will hover around the mid to low 40s. Some snow could fall on Friday night in Everett, forecasts show, but there is little to no snow accumulation expected.
Eliza Aronson: 425-339-3434; eliza.aronson@heraldnet.com; X: @ElizaAronson.
Eliza’s stories are supported by the Herald’s Environmental and Climate Reporting Fund.
Will Geschke: 425-339-3443; william.geschke@heraldnet.com; X: @willgeschke.
