What a week. And what a year it was to finish the decade!
January 2009 started with heavy rain, courtesy of the pineapple express. You probably know that’s the nickname given to very wet, warm systems that tap into moisture down near Hawaii and then pump that heavy rain right over us. We had some flooding in parts of Southwest Washington to start the year, because of we were quickly melting our 19” of snow that fell in December 2008.
This December, it was a lot different. Instead of huge snowfalls predicted accurately five to seven days ahead of time like last year, we had a much smaller “surprise snow” of about 2.3 inches in Vancouver. Stevenson reported 2.5 inches, Kalama 1.5 inches and Battle Ground, Brush Prairie and Camas about an inch of this “surprise white.”
A lot of people have asked me what happened and why no one seemed to predict the snow. Well, here’s my explanation, but first, let’s start with my forecast Monday night for Tuesday, the day of the snow. I predicted rain, change to snow for a bit, then back to rain. I did this based on the latest forecast tools available to me at the time. It looked like a tug of war between cold and warm that had snow temporarily winning the fight — only to have the rain win the overall battle. Whoops, snow came on strong and never let the rain get a word in until the heavy white flakes decreased and everything on the ground had turned white.
The biggest problem, in my book, is how we started the day. Instead of upper 20s to about 30 for a low, we were in the low to mid-20s right out of the gate. And by the time the moisture arrived, we were two degrees cooler than my forecast high of 39. My forecast was the coldest of any of the television meteorologists. Only problem — it wasn’t cold enough! So it’s so cold we start as snow — then moisture became quite heavy. As some of the moisture evaporates on the way down to us, it cools the air, and that drops out temperatures. In fact, much of Clark County dropped five degrees in less than two hours thanks to that fact. And that kept us in the snow game for the duration of the constant moisture.
