Weather Eye: Our skies are full of drama

Weather seems to travel with the wind and provides daily extremes. And there have been lots of extremes around the Evergreen state of late.

The Puget Sound region saw record highs Monday, with Bellingham reaching 61 degrees and Hoquiam and Quillayute also setting new marks. Balmy highs in the 50s were common in most areas all last week.

Speaking of Quillayute, one of the wettest areas in the state anyway, it set new rainfall records last week. Monday, they measured 4.59 inches breaking the 1987 record of 2.46 inches. Tuesday brought 0.81 of an inch in the rain bucket; Wednesday, 0.36 of an inch; Thursday, 3.41 inches, surpassing the record 3.11 inches set in 1996. Friday’s 2.27 inches swamped the 1976 record of 1.73 inches. For the first 15 days of this month, they have seen 19.16 inches of rain, a rate that would bring them near a 40-inch month — but of course that’s unlikely as the heaviest rains begin to shift to our south.

Vancouver’s monthly rainfall as of Friday was a healthy 4.27 inches, more than an inch above normal.

Many regions in our state had flood warnings or flood watches in the past few days, but by now most have expired. At least for this go-around, the Chehalis River remained below its banks and gave us no major flooding as we have seen in the past couple of years.

California will be inundated with rainfall; expect to hear weather-related news from down there. We will be on the cooler side of the jet stream, so what moisture does fall should help the mountain snowpack — good news indeed.

Pat Timm is a local weather specialist. His column appears Tuesdays, Thursdays and Sundays. Reach him at weathersystems.com.