Rain and cool temperatures broke through months of extreme heat and excessive wildfire smoke in Whatcom County on Friday.
Residents celebrated the rain, with early-morning showers likely to last all weekend.
“We’ve had incredibly dry conditions for the past four months, and it just did not dissipate in [early] October like it normally does,” said Dustin Guy, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service in Seattle. “The good news is we do see a major transition in the weather pattern starting this weekend, and taking us into the foreseeable future to a much more typical mid-fall kind of weather pattern.”
Throughout the last week, western Washington residents saw record-breaking heat and poor air quality, as temperatures in Seattle hit 88 degrees, the second-warmest October day recorded in the last 130 years.
Air quality, too, was significantly degraded as late-season wildfires raged along the Cascade Mountains, with the air quality index (AQI) in parts of Whatcom and Skagit counties peaking over 300 throughout the week, according to PurpleAir, an air monitoring and tracking group. A “good” AQI measures between zero and 50, and in Whatcom, the AQI was more than seven times the average October day on Thursday, according to IQAir.
Though the rain will be beneficial in fighting the ongoing wildfires in the Cascades and across Canada, the NWS says it’s really the “onshore flow” that will help dissipate the smoke.
“Onshore flow is basically westerly winds coming in from the ocean, so we’re going to have a couple of weather systems moving through the area here over the next few days,” Guy said. “In terms of the smoke, it’s really the beginning of the end.”
This year was relatively mild for wildfires, according to Hilary Franz, the Commissioner of Public Lands in Washington. On Oct. 12, Franz announced just over 140,300 acres have burned around the state — the fewest number of acres burned in a decade.
Despite the smaller affected area, air quality remains a major concern. On Wednesday, Seattle had the worst air quality out of any major city worldwide, with an AQI reading of 236. At the same time, Bellingham’s AQI measured 288.
“This has really been quite the fire season,” Guy said on Thursday. “We have had a ridge of high pressure [systems] over us basically for months now that didn’t want to budge. It sat over us and exacerbated the ongoing dry conditions and just brought on a really, really historic fire season.”
Friday’s weather brought some of the first major rain since this year’s cold, wet, “soul-sucking” spring weather, and broke the several-monthslong drought in the county.
According to the U.S. Drought Monitor, run by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Whatcom County was experiencing moderate to severe drought over the last three months.
In a typical year, the Bellingham International Airport will see more than 4 inches of rainfall between July 1 and Sept. 30. That same period this year saw only .59 inches of rain.
“We’ve just got to hang tight for another day or two, and things will really start to change around here,” Guy said.
