Friday Feb 4: Scattered light showers possible this afternoon and evening. Otherwise dry weather will stay with us through the end of next week and the following weekend. Could get a little breezy Saturday afternoon (gusts up to 15 mph). Expect night/morning fog to continue. Skies over the next week will vary from partly to mostly cloudy to mostly clear, so we'll definitely see some sunshine. High temps next 5-7 days upper 40's to mid 50's, lows upper 20's to low 30's. We've recorded 23.82" of precipitation since the start of the water year on Oct 1. Normal to date is 25.57". Regional snow pack is 125% of average. Oregon has not had any improvement to the weekly updated Drought Monitor since January 4th. In early January, drought outlooks were showing drought ending during February across much of the region. Because the water faucet got turned off, outlooks have done a 180, and now reflect drought "continuing or worsening" through February.

Check out the GIF - all that orange/red is anomalous high pressure between the surface and 18,000 feet through Feb 20! La Nina and other weather oscillations have been interacting with each other which has thrown curve balls into the weather patterns. The result is that persistent, anomalous, and strong high pressure has aided in keeping the jet stream well to the north since about January 8th. There's signals that the oscillation interactions might start to trend opposite around Feb 18-22 and continue into at least mid-March. This would, in turn, cause the storm door to open with successive low pressure systems passing through the PacNW. So as it looks right now, we should see storms more regularly passing through from late February through possibly mid-March and beyond.