More rain on the way tonight - here's why

Sure, it's been a soggy day out there around the Willamette Valley, but we're certainly not the only area getting wet today.

In looking at the satellite image, we marveled at just how large this storm is and how far its moisture plume stretched back across the Pacific Ocean -- nearly reaching Vietnam!

So I fired up Google Earth and did some rough calculations, and if you count the broad area of low pressure that covers from central Alaska to halfway-to-Hawaii and west-to-east from the Aleutian Islands to about Boise, Idaho, that storm covers about 5.93 million square miles! 

Then, if you add in the plume of moisture that stretches from that western boundary of the low back to its origin just to the east of Vietnam, I came up with another 3.1 million square miles.

Put the two together, and you've got 9 million square miles of western North America and the Pacific Ocean getting wet from this storm and plume. To put that in perspective, it's big enough to cover Oregon about 92 times!

Photo: Google Earth, with satellite imagery taken early on June 2, 2010.