A dry November weekend in Seattle?!? How rare is that?

All this talk these past several weeks has been about atmospheric rivers and wind advisories and even some vivid thunderstorms and severe weather.

What say we shift gears just in time for the weekend?

A ridge of high pressure is building in Friday, and it’ll help dry out the last lingering showers from Thursday’s storm.  And unlike our last ridges of high pressure, this one aims to stick around more than like 20 minutes.

SO LIKE, WHAT, 25 MINUTES?!

In fact, it’s going to hang out all weekend! The raw model data shows a 0% chance of rain in the Puget Sound area both weekend days.

The only weather challenge of the weekend will be some areas of morning fog, finding a spot to let your coat drip dry from Wednesday and Thursday, and remembering where you might have last had your sunglasses. It might even edge up near 60 degrees on Sunday — and yes, for some reason, that now feels warm. One month ago today, it was 75 degrees.

MY GRANDPA ONCE TOLD ME ABOUT THE TIME SEATTLE HAD A DRY WEEKEND IN NOVEMBER. IT SOUNDED GLORIOUS!

Dry weekends in November in Seattle are not impossible… but they aren’t exactly common.

Going back through 2004, there have been 82 weekends through last weekend (not counting fractured weekends where a day might fall on Oct. 31 or Dec. 1). Of those, 66 have had measurable rain at some point, meaning only 16 have been totally dry, or about 1 out of every 5.

Put another way, dry weekends in November are batting about .195 in Seattle, but are about to come through the clutch if you had big outdoor plans.

Forget the traffic reports on I-5, I suspect there will be high volumes on the local sidewalks and trails as everyone races outdoors. Just remember, don’t camp in the left lane!

WELL, HE ALSO SAID HE STILL WALKED TO WORK UPHILL BAREFOOT IN THE SNOW THAT WEEKEND, SO I’M SKEPTICAL…

I can understand why. There have been three times since 2019 that a rainy weekend in November kicked off a streak of rain-on-a-weekend that lasted through the entire autumn and into the final weeks of winter.

Five years ago this weekend, it rained on the weekend of Nov. 7-8…and then rained at some point on the next 21 weekends until we finally wrung out on March 27-28, 2021.

That came off a stretch in 2019-2020 where it rained on 18 weekends in a row from Nov. 9 to March 7. So for TWO ENTIRE WINTERS* (*-roughly speaking) it rained at some point on every weekend!

It did it *again* in 2022-23 with a 16 rainy weekend stretch from Nov. 26 into March 11.

It’s of course impossible to predict what all the future winter weekends hold, but with La Niña here, odds are leaning toward above average rainfall for a while. So any dry weekends after this could be rare and noteworthy.

Already rain looks to return early Monday morning and we’ve got showers back in the forecast at times next week (though Veterans Day is holding dry at this point), just the pattern isn’t as stormy as the past few. So back into the puddles on the walks and treks to work.

Just remember you don’t really have to go barefoot; your grandkids will never know.