6 PM Nowcast

The snow is slowly moving in, but nothing much going on in the central Puget Sound yet--the commute for virtually all of you is safe.

Snow has slowly extended from the coast to Shelton and some scattered light snow showers have been reported in the south Sound. Snow has been falling for hours on the north coast across the NW Olympic Peninsula, with light snow across portions of the San Juans into Bellingham now.

Here is the radar image at 5:47 PM from RainWatch. Remember the beam is way above the surface in most places and lot of this snow is not reaching the surface, particularly on the east side of the Sound.. There is one modest band moving through the south Sound, but the stuff behind it is unremarkable. And the easterly flow off the Cascades is really attenuating the snow east of the Sound.

And the snow is running out of time as the temperatures aloft are now warming as warm Pacific air moves in. In 4-6 hours it will be too late!

We don't have a regular radar on the coast, but we do have a vertically pointing radar at Westport (part of NOAA's atmospheric river observatory). Here is the latest image. You can see the lowering cloud deck and precipitation reaching the surface....looks like more intense precipitation moving in there...which would reach Puget Sound in a few hours.

So we have an interesting tug of war over Seattle and the east side--- who will win?...the drying easterlies or the snow band coming in? The models suggest the former!