Mountain Weather Forecast

Weather Synopsis

It's a stormy Christmas Eve out there in the mountains. Depending on the location, you could find rain, sleet, freezing rain, or snow. Not exactly the presents we were all hoping for. As we head into the evening, precipitation should start to taper and become more showery. The battle between incoming warm air and entrenched cold temperatures east of the Cascades continues. A shift to westerly flow behind the front will favor the warm air mass and help scour out cold pockets in the East Central zone. A loss of easterly flow and warmer temperatures at the Passes should lead to a switch from freezing rain to all rain sometime overnight. When exactly this change will occur is very hard to say, but it appears to be in the wee hours of the morning. For locations further east, freezing rain may continue where cold air stays trapped in the valley bottoms. The last refuge for the frigid temperatures will be the Methow region. However, even that appears to be overwhelmed by the strong westerly winds and warm temperatures, leading to rain or freezing rain by Christmas morning. 

A transient ridge will pass over the region very early Sunday and provide a brief break in the precipitation, just in time to help Santa and his reindeer visit good little skiers and riders. You may even see a few holes in the clouds on Christmas morning. However, any reprieve will be short-lived. A warm front will lift northward over the region mid-day and bring with it another round of precipitation. This time, with warm air in place over most of our region, we should see a mainly rain event. Look for precipitation and winds to increase in the late afternoon and evening hours as a trailing cold front starts to approach the Northwest. 

The weather models are struggling with the storm Sunday night into Monday, so confidence is quite low. However, slightly cooler temperatures should bring rain and high-elevation snow to the mountains with the heaviest precipitation focusing on the volcanoes.