Merry Green Christmas or The Five Rainy Days of Christmas!
The good news is, we need the rain. The bad news is, if you’re looking for a White Christmas this will not be your year! Let’s look at the upcoming weekend.
Five bouts of rain – First Today
It will be interesting to see if my ‘Rain Storm” value on my station has a chance to reset between now and New Year’s. It needs a 24hr gap in measuring rainfall. I’m not sure it’s going to get it!
A disorganized system is bring us showers and rain today. The strongest rain showers will happen this evening. The image below shows rain overtop Port Alberni the 4-7PM hours.
Showers should taper off Wednesday afternoon.
Second bout – Thursday night/Friday
On Thursday a new system starts to impact the North Island. We might get some showers out of it here by Thursday morning but it is mostly focused on areas north of Tofino and Campbell River.
That is until the main band slides down…. Thursday night. We might see some Wind Warnings pop up.
It will push through on Friday and make for a lot of wet and maybe blustery driving if you’re planning on going anywhere Friday afternoon and evening, prepare accordingly!
Third Bout – Christmas Day (after a weekend break)
Saturday looks relatively clear of rain, if not clear in the sky and the model predicts that a system will dissipate off of Vancouver Island before reaching us on Christmas Eve, so that’s good!
Christmas Day will be a different story.
The 10AM Christmas Day picture above shows strong Southerly and SouthEasterly winds off the coast as the front approaches.
The picture below ha a strong rain frontal system making landfall on the Island between 1PM-4PM on Christmas Day. It will continue through the evening but should dry out by morning Boxing Day hopefully without any major disruptions.
Storm Four – The Strongest – Boxing Day
I have some concern about Boxing Day from this system:
You can see strong southeasterly winds up to 35knots before the moisture and shifting to southerly as it passes. You can also see the long tail of heavy moisture to the southwest.
This system will slam the entire Southwest Coast and Pacific Northwest in the afternoon of Boxing Day. The picture below is for 10-1PM Sunday. Heavy rain around Port Alberni and Tofino.
Heavy rains will continue into the night and then clear by morning on December 27.
Bout 5 – Finishing a wet week
At the very end of the forecast range it predicts yet another rain system to approach the Island on December 28th. Again, some strong southeasterly winds, but with it so far out in the future, it’s hard to be decisive.
What we can be sure of, I think, is that we’ll get our fair share of rain in the next week. And all of these look like typical, warm, Pacific systems that will bring only rain to the lowlands. What happens on the mountains is a little less certain. Hopefully at least some of these produce significant snowpack.
It looks like the coldest night will be Christmas Eve where it might just barely hit freezing with the skies clear between systems. So if you’re looking for now, the local mountains will be your best bet!
Improvements to the Forecast Widget.
I’ve made a number of improvements to the forecasts that you see on the front page and elsewhere. I’ve added some more highlighting and better formatting. I’ve added a bunch of new Tseshaht and Hupacasath words to the Indigenous translations. I’ve also added a bunch of formatting for the marine forecasts, including proper highlighting of Gale, Storm, Hurricane and other marine warnings.
Improvements and Challenges for the Website
I’ve also made some improvements to the website as a whole but it’s still suffering from temporary periods where it can’t handle the load and becomes unavailable (503 Errors). If you see this error, just come back in 5-10 minutes and it should be back online. I’ve simply not able to afford a higher-capacity server space, so the demands at least for now on the website are outstripping the capacity. I apologize for the inconvenience.
On the bright side, the webcam has been working flawlessly and the livestream page now works for all web browsers. The stream is also on Youtube. It’s doing great!
Thanks everyone for checking out the website. I hope you continue to find it useful in the New Year!
If I don’t update before then, have a very Merry Christmas, Happy Holidays and Happy New Years!
Chris
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