Weather Eye: No sign of rain ahead, so skies to stay hazy

Our autumn dry spell continues, with a dry Monday and really no rain in sight for the next week or so. Every time an extended forecast model hints of rain, the next data lower the chances.

So, more of the same with morning clouds some days and perhaps some offshore flow pushing highs toward 80 degrees or so. Today will be cool with lots of clouds. Even the overnight lows will be on the mild side this week.

Monday after the morning fog lifted the skies were very hazy, with smoke from the Wenatchee fires and higher clouds. The sun filtering through had that smoky yellowish orange color. We finally see the end of the smoke from the summer fires in Siberia and now have our own fires to contend with.

My friend and weather observer Roland Derksen of Vancouver, B.C., informed me that they have been experiencing the Wenatchee smoke, too. It seems nobody in the Pacific Northwest can escape.

The weather won’t be helping any time soon — yes, we have longer hours of darkness and somewhat higher humidity, but what we really need are a couple of good rainstorms. I would expect some hotspots on the east slopes of the Cascades to linger until October or until the snow flies.

September so far

Although it is not uncommon to get very little or no rain at all in July and August, it is unusual to go through all of September with only a few hundreds of an inch.

As of Monday, Vancouver has officially had only the 0.04 of an inch of rain that fell Sept. 10. We are running an inch of rain below average so far this month. Our average mean temperature is exactly normal — 64.8 degrees.

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