May 19th PNW Weather Update, Fire Outlook!

Added: 2026-05-20

[00:00:00]Hey everybody, Michael Snyder, Pacific Northwest Weather Watch. Today is May 19th. Right now, we're looking at the infrared satellite imagery, and you can see this kind of anticyclonic rotation out here. We got a ridge out over the Pacific Ocean here, and it's kind of keeping us in this northwesterly flow.

[00:00:16]We have some clouds across the region here today, as you can see, moving across the region. There's some high-level clouds, there's some lower-level clouds around some of western Washington here this morning, but not much in the way of precipitation. We'll take a look at what's coming as we go through this upcoming week, what's coming through the extended forecast. We'll check out some of the fire season outlook here as well, and we'll dive into all that here as we go through the video this morning. We'll even take a quick look to see if there's any dust devil chasing possibilities in eastern Washington. If you didn't know, there are some pretty big ones that do form out there. I consider it one of the prime dust devil chasing areas on the planet. You got dryland farming out there, and you can get some really crazy ones. It's very fun. I take my kids out there and stuff like that. So, yeah.

[00:00:58]Anyway, we'll take a look at that, too.

[00:01:00]So, if we take a look at the visible satellite imagery, in fact, I'm going to back this up a little bit here, actually make it shorter, and we're going to run through this loop. You can see some of these cumulus clouds popping off here across from northeast Washington, BC, Idaho, and portions of Montana. We can't rule out a thunderstorm with some of this activity here today. As you can continue to see the afternoon heating kind of allow those convective cumulus clouds to build. But, you can also see we're fairly socked in here across from southwest BC, western Washington. But, once you get across the Willamette Valley and the Oregon coast, you are dealing with quite a nice day out there, just some high passing clouds across the region. So, looking here at what I got yesterday in Kansas, there's the Dominator. This thing is built to actually go into some of the weaker tornadoes, and this pipe right there, they're shooting rockets into this and trying to get it up into the storm area. I pre- believe the previous day they actually got it into one of the tornadoes out there. And of course, they got all that scientific data and tells you, you know, the rate of climb out here and just exactly where the probe goes up into the tornado. But yeah, you can see this see this thing churning up stuff at the surface. This is when they were passing us and then we came up here, turned back around, came back north and it was getting pretty wrapped in rain by that time. But a very interesting scene there yesterday coming through the town between the trees. You could see the tornado perfectly. Just kind of a gorgeous scene coming up on that. So yeah, had some fun out there in my storm chasing. And as you can see now I'm back in the studio here in Seattle.

[00:02:23]And uh yeah, I may go out there at maybe the end of this week, maybe not until next week for the next storm chase.

[00:02:28]We'll see how that goes. And for those of you guys who didn't see this, I did actually see a weak tornado here in Normandy Park if you can believe it. And at times you could see some of this stretching back down towards the ground here. And yeah, it had a full rear flank downdraft. It had a classic, you know, tornado features. And somebody else actually got a view from it from uh the west as well. So yeah, I was uh glad to see that out there. Made for an exciting evening. And if you want your own affordable home weather station here, this does a temperature. It's got a nice temperature thermometer reading in there. It's got an ultrasonic anemometer, haptic rain gauge, all solar powered. You don't have to plug anything in except for the unit in your house.

[00:03:05]Small little attractive unit. You plug it in and that reads this Wi-Fi from your station and then it broadcasts that and you can view it on your smartphone wherever you go. So click on the link down below to uh save 10% off on one of those. Helps support the channel as well. So looking at that ridge out over the Pacific Ocean Hawaii Islands bottom left and you can see what I was chasing out here. This trough coming up across the Dakotas there. And as we go on in through this week, you see the ridging kind of remaining in place. It's going to keep us relatively dry here in the Pacific Northwest. What I'm eyeballing here is the ridge starts to flatten out as we go on in through the weekend and then maybe a nice system, a nice frontal system comes swinging through there. A seasonably strong storm there as we go towards the end of May. We'll be watching that. It's a ways out there. So I don't want to get too excited about it just yet. We'll see how it goes.

[00:03:54]But these systems are not atypical for this time of year. We tend to get these frontal systems and even some mountain snow as we go through the month of May.

[00:04:00]It can even happen in the month of June.

[00:04:02]It just becomes much less difficult to really build up the snow pack at this time of year. But then it shows another system after that, kind of a weak frontal system as we go up at the very end of May and then another ridge builds in. Who knows about that extended forecast? We'll continue to check back on that on a daily basis. I'm going to skip the RRFFS right now. We're going to look at the European model. So if we go through the day today, you can see where the thunderstorm potential is probably highest here again BC, down towards Northwest Montana. Anything that's falling across BC or Washington is fairly light here today. And again with the ridge off the coastline, you can see not much in the way precipitation getting into Washington, a little bit better across BC there, but very light precipitation if any at all as we go on out towards the weekend. But now as we head on into Sunday night, we start to get some changes here. If you believe the models this far out, this is hour 144, 6 days out. But look at that low out there, a 992 millibar low. Would actually be a bit breezy here for some of the coastal areas as that comes on shore.

[00:05:00]Late season storm will run through there. Again, it's a little ways out there. So let's not get too excited just yet. It's probably already too late for me cuz I get excited pretty easily about when a model starts to show stuff coming in here. But we'll be watching that on a daily basis is what I'm trying to say.

[00:05:15]Now, Wednesday, uh May 20th. This is for tomorrow. High temperatures, you can see some upper 70s, Tri-Cities, Boise mid-70s, Bend, Oregon, Willamette Valley. Nice day out there as well. Then tomorrow we start to bounce things back.

[00:05:28]Look at some of the Puget Sound getting into the upper 70s there, maybe Olympia, Chehalis 80°. You're looking at some 80s for the Willamette Valley, 80s for Tri-Cities, and you're warming up into Southwest BC as well. Look at some of the interior valleys down into Southwest Oregon into the upper 80s. We go through Friday, Saturday. look at Eastern Washington ramping up the heat. Boise, Idaho upper 80s, 80 for Portland maybe.

[00:05:53]Look at Seattle, nice day on Saturday.

[00:05:55]There's Sunday and then that next storm system maybe trying to move in here and you can kind of see it suppress the temperatures a bit across the region.

[00:06:02]But again, let's watch this over the next few days and just see how strong that storm system is going to be before we get too excited. Now, taking a look here, I scoped this out a little bit and if we look on in towards Thursday. So, on the day Well, this is Wednesday, so that explains that. We go through the day Thursday, I like to chase out here by Ritzville here. There's dryland farming, the farmers get out there and plow and you can just see monster dust devils. They look like mini tornadoes.

[00:06:29]They're not generally dangerous and they are fun to film and they are fun to watch and you can see hundreds of them on a day out there and Thursday it looks like not too bad of a day. The winds might be light enough where you could get some good dust devil formation there. Clouds move in, but as we go through Friday, there's another sunny day setting up potentially there as well with some light winds. You want the winds fairly light. You want those thermals. You want the heat to really build up there on the surface and then you can get some nice dust devil action. So, maybe Thursday and Friday, we'll see. If it looks good, I might go out there and chase. But yeah, something to do, you know, if if you're really hard up for some weather. But I do have a great time every time I go out there. And if we take a look here at Thursday and Friday, you can kind of see the winds out of the north and east tend to come in a bit lighter when it's out of the east. You'll get a little bit of a westerly kick or it'll try in the afternoon and then so the winds might be light enough Thursday and then maybe yet again there on Friday light enough winds kind of an offshore component across Eastern Washington. But also, you can kind of see the northerly's coming down some of the Willamette Valley. Taking a look at what else is going on here. Nothing too exceptional. We don't have any big wind event coming until that storm system as we go through the early portion of the next week and again, we'll continue to watch that. Now, if we take a look at the rainfall since the beginning of the year, even with the last cooler pattern we had, you can see there is the majority of the Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Montana are below normal precipitation so far since January 1st. And you can see some areas are quite a bit below normal across northeast Washington. Oregon has really been hit hard here. Virtually all the locations are melted out across the Oregon Cascades. A lot of areas are melted out completely across the Washington Cascades as well. Average temperatures, you can see during this La Niña year has been above normal since January 1st, and significant wildland fire potential outlook. This is June 2026. It starts to ramp up here for eastern Washington and Oregon, down into California. By July, it starts to cover some of the Cascades and the Olympic Mountains as well. And by August, it's got virtually the entire Pacific Northwest kind of locked into that above normal significant wildland fire potential again here. And there's the National National Interagency Fire Center there in Boise, Idaho, that makes these forecasts. So, yeah, be prepared for that. And again, there's a lot of moving parts that go into this. You can get well-timed storms that go on into summertime that can really help out and keep the fire season at bay. Or, when you have years like this, when you have very low snowpack, you're drying things out a month, a month and a half in advance for many locations, you can really be setting the stage for a very active fire season.

[00:09:03]And there's the El Niño surge I did this morning, and you can see uh the the dynamic average has a very strong El Niño, a super El Niño coming in here.

[00:09:13]That's that red line. The green line below it is the statistical average.

[00:09:17]It's very close to super as well. So, that's likely where we're headed as we go through this upcoming fall and on into next winter, which tends to bring drier than normal and warmer than normal conditions across Pacific Northwest.

[00:09:29]Now, taking a look at precipitation, we might expect here. And again, even the national and other models, if you look out far enough, it doesn't really have a lot of that precept for the next storm.

[00:09:38]So, we'll be watching that closely, but you can kind of see it will be a below normal signal here for a lot of the Pacific Northwest. And if we take a look at the artificial intelligence ensemble mean over the next 15 days, you continue to see this dry signal. You got to go across portions of Vancouver Island. A I mean, it's it is actually fairly strong for some locations here, and this is again the next 15 days. Um and just a reminder across the mountains out there, uh Stevens Pass is virtually completely melted out. So, on May 8th, they they melted out really close to what about May 6th, and they usually have an incredible 27 in of water equivalent out there. Each inch is 27,000 gallons on an acre. So, that is just a huge amount of water that is not there across our higher terrain. Snow uh not Snoqualmie, but Stampede Pass has been virtually melted out since about May 10th or so, and they usually again have over 25 26 27 in of snow water equivalent. Again, millions billions of gallons of water are not there across our higher terrain.

[00:10:40]You can see the usual meltout day is what, you know, June 12th, and we did it closer to May 8th. So, over a month in advance.

[00:10:48]Um but what else? I guess that's about all I have for you. I'm super tired. I just flew in here this morning, didn't get much sleep last night, but had a lot of fun out there storm chasing as per usual. Um I may go out again next week.

[00:10:59]I'll bring my show on the road if I do.

[00:11:01]Hopefully, you guys are having a good day otherwise. Um yeah, and I will catch you guys in tomorrow's forecast.