Western Washington Lowland Snow forecast that comes in ‘Focus’

Seattle – Have you ever looked back on photos taken with your early mobile phones? The chance is that they are kind of blurry and of low quality compared to what you can easily catch today. This is because modern phones generally include much more powerful cameras that catch photographs with incredible details thanks to improved resolution. Our modern forecasts computer models work in a similar way.

Weather models in 2025 are far more powerful and accurate than those available 10 or 20 years ago. Those with “high resolution” are now easily accessible for road enthusiasts to review online. However, these models with high resolution take a lot of computing power and generally run only 48 to 72 hours in advance.

Now that we close the chance of lowlands snow in the first weekend of February, the high resolution models help bring this difficult prognosis to sharper focus.

Related | Get the latest snow forecast for Western Washington

Look at the difference between low resolution models compared to those higher resolution. The American model, generally known as “GFS” (abbreviation, stands for the global prognosis system), is run on low resolution as an expanded prognosis that goes over two weeks into the future.

To do so, it breaks the soil into squares that are 25 with 25 kilometers wide (the version from our como -weather software shown below – other versions of the GFs run in different grid sizes). These are large squares, relatively speaking. When the size of the size is located above western Washington, the squares are too large to really account for the complex topography of western Washington.

While one lower Resolution model like this may work OK in a flat area like Iowa, it will struggle to understand the complicated turns between the sea surface at Elliott Bay and 14,411 foot summit in Mount Rainier.

As such, look at the forecast of Lowland Snow Totals for our area at noon on Sunday using the 25×25 km GFS model. A kind of blurry and generalized, isn’t it?

The model sees that it is cold enough for snow and there is moisture to work with, but it struggles to discover the difference between how much snow we see across our microclimates. Either way, it is already trying to communicate that the mountains will see a lot of snow, while the lowlands will not see as much.

Now we look at the European model (known in weather circles with pleasure as the “euro”), which is also a model that predicts most of the Earth. However, the European global model, available in our Komo Weather Data, breaks the planet to smaller 9 kilometers of squares, equivalent to a more powerful camera, this model has more powerful resolution than the American model we have just looked at. In this graphic you will see more details when our complex terrain gets more consideration.

Finally, the graph model has included in our Komo Weather Software even better resolution. We are close enough to this weekend -sne event that the 4 kilometer version of graph is available. Note the much more detailed contours that account for the higher snow that is expected between now and noon on Sunday in the mountains, but the lighter amounts expected of the lowland model.

From the top of Mt. Si to the valley carved by Hood Canal, the smaller squares used by this model, see the complexity of our terrain.

As a camera that breaks a photograph into more and more pixels, the higher resolution models can focus on the difficulties of our complicated maritime-to-Bjerg’s location.

All the big models, including GFS and EURO, will turn out their versions of “high -resolution forecasts” when we close in on Groundhog Day Weekend Snow. These snapshots that appear here are just through dinner on Sunday; More snow is probably Sunday night to Monday, and the overalls vary widely throughout western Washington. We share the focused forecasts for the whole event when they become available.

Click here to see the latest forecast for Western Washington.