Storm update and forecast for Monday Feb 5th
*Flood Warnings slowly being reduced back to watches
*Wind Warnings through late Sunday - Early Monday*
*High Surf Advisory through Monday
*Winter Storm Warning through Tuesday*
The main front of our latest storm system is passing to our south and east. The threat for showers now comes in to play as low pressure passes to our north. Several watches, advisories and warnings for the storm are still in play. A flood Watch means that the potential is there and then would be upgraded to an advisory when rain starts to get heavy and or duration drags on. Flood Warnings are when it is either occurring or appears to be imminent. We have now seen advisories and warnings posted for flooding across the entire area, but now being dropped back to watches. Wind watches are titled according to speed with Advisory levels usually seeing gust speeds around 35 to 45 mph. When wind watches go to warning level it means wind gusts are likely above 50 mph. We will update the watches to advisories and or warnings as soon as they are made official. We also have the potential for heavy snow above about 6000 feet where Warnings are in place for possible multiple feet and blowing snow from the strong winds. Lastly, high surf from a westerly ground swell will combine with southerly wind swell to make for large waves along the entire coast. High Surf Advisory is in play through Monday with the highest ocean tides occurring near 5 am. The good news is that we have a third quarter waning Moon and tides are not extreme at this time.
The storm will linger in to early next week with pockets of heavy showers possible as well as thunder chances. Thunder could bring lightning, strong gusty winds and even small tornadoes or waterspouts. Again, this storm has a lot of energy to work with and close monitoring is really advised as well as staying home and off the roads if possible. Light showers will be possible through at least Tuesday morning. We then hope to see some drying out on Wednesday before another system rolls in for Thursday. While we don't see the strong dynamics to make for another big storm, the ground will be saturated and more rain, even light amounts, could create more problems. Beyond that, another storm system takes aim at us by next weekend. Once again, the dynamics keep it fairly weak or mild and this is a bit far off for us to make a solid forecast. We will focus on our current storm and then get busy with the details for the next systems as we get in to next week.
