Whatcom County’s First Snow Fall
Whatcom County residents woke up to it’s first snow of the year with a couple of inches overnite. As I’m writing this post this afternoon, it’s actually starting to snow pretty heavy now. Were suppose to get about 4-6 inches of total accumulation and then warm up on Sunday with the Pineapple express on it’s way.
The Northwest corner of Washington State normally gets about on average around 10-14 days of accumulated snow on the ground. Being a lifetime resident of the Puget Sound region, that’s what I’ve experienced in my lifetime. sometimes we might get a little trace amount and then gone by the end of the day, and in other seasons, we’ll get a foot of snow that can last for weeks. but in general, we really don’t get that much snow down here near sea level.
Last year we had accumulations of snow several times with good accumulations. Back about ten years ago we had blizzard type conditions in Bellingham and Whatcom County was closed down for about 3 days. However, if you go up into the mountains towards Mt. Baker it’s a different story, they usually set world records for the amount of snow accumulations up or near the Mt. Baker ski area.
Northwest Washington starts getting heavier amounts of rains and wind storms in November and depending on the year, can continue into March. but the biggest storms we get are usually in November and December. We get most of our moisture coming off the Pacific Ocean from the south west and this slams into Oregon, Washington, and British Columbia. We call it the Pineapple express because if you watch the local weather channels, the cloud patterns and jet stream is coming from the area of the Hawaiian Islands and heads directly to the Northwest. With the Pineapple express, rain and winds are much warmer than if it was coupled with a Northeaster blowing out of the Frasier Valley of British Columbia at the same time. Then you would have the chance of a blizzard because of the really cold weather, wind and snow.
In that Storm we had back in 1997, We had the Pineapple express with a lot of moisture and winds hit directly at the same time a Northeaster blew out of the Frasier Valley with really cold temperatures and it’s own wind. It was pretty interesting to go through.
Jerry Campbell - Muljat Group - Bellingham, WA 98225 - Bellingham Real Estate