The storm that wasn’t was swept away by a warm wind that came early, National Weather Service officials said Tuesday.
Dan Bates/ The Herald
Only light amounts of snow fell around the Puget Sound region Monday night and Tuesday morning, with little of it sticking.
The forecast had called for a storm that was to sprinkle up to 2 inches of snow on the Everett-Seattle-Tacoma area.
Weather experts say forecasts will improve in the future, but for now they would rather be overprepared for a storm than not ready at all.
It did snow about an inch in parts of Everett and Mill Creek, said Andy Haner, a weather service meteorologist. Several other Snohomish County cities received traces of snow, he said.
The storm hit harder in Bellingham, Bellevue, Olympia and Kitsap County.
But the snow in many places was gone by daylight.
The forecast did indicate that any snow that fell would start melting about 7 a.m. when the weather warmed up and it started raining. It was incorrect in saying more snow would fall near the water rather than in the foothills, as usual.
But emergency services personnel were prepared anyway.
A major accumulation in Snohomish County never happened because east-to-west winds that were predicted to last all night were at first too strong, and then were replaced by a westerly wind sooner than expected, Haner said.
“The expectation was the wind would change at about 6 or 7 a.m.,” he said. “The wind change happened three to four hours earlier.”
The forecast for snow never should have been issued in the first place, said Cliff Mass, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Washington.
“There wasn’t going to be any snow,” Mass said.
Mass is leading a UW effort to develop a more accurate forecasting model, which predicted that this storm would produce little snow.
“The old approach is to do one run, one (forecasting) simulation, do the best you can, and say that’s reality. And then human beings can interpret that reality,” Mass said.
The weather service uses a variety of models, including the UW’s, Haner said. He said the UW model called for no snow, but another model predicted 1 to 2 inches, and a third predicted 2 to 4 inches.
“We learn from experience,” Haner said. “Some of our experiences before this showed that this pattern had the potential to bring some snow.”
Asking the public to get prepared for a storm that never materializes doesn’t mean that people will stop listening to warnings, said Roger Serra, director of the Snohomish County Department of Emergency Management.
“If it doesn’t happen, we’d rather be proactive than reactive,” Serra said.
The same goes for the state Department of Transportation, which clears the highways of snow and ice.
“If we weren’t prepared, trying to play catch-up in a snowstorm is a nightmare,” spokeswoman Jamie Holter said. Being prepared averts accidents, prevents injuries and saves lives, she said.
The UW model will be released to the public in January. It uses a weather prediction model that runs as many as 20 scenarios for each forecast, each slightly different from the previous one.
Each scenario is graded on how well it predicted the weather the previous few days. Those with the highest accuracy get more weight when putting together the new forecast.
“If all these forecasts give the same answer, then you can have a lot of confidence in your forecast,” Mass said.
Both Haner and Mass said forecasting is becoming more accurate.
“It’s a fact that our five-day forecast today is as good as our three-day forecast was 10 years ago,” Haner said. “Our three-day forecast now is about as good as our two-day forecast of 10 years ago.”
Reporter Lukas Velush: 425-339-3449 or lvelush@ heraldnet.com.
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