I thought this article from the Seattle times about a proposed weather radar station was interesting. The current radars are located in Portland and on Camano Island, but the Olympic and Oregon coast mountain ranges prevent those radar stations from seeing incoming storms. Severe weather forecasting would be much improved with an additional radar on the Washington coast, according to this excerpt:

Much of the weather service's change of heart can be traced to several major storms that battered the region over the past several years, Cliff Mass (UW meteorologist) believes. The worst hit in early December 2007, with hurricane-force winds on the coast and drenching rains and floods in Southwest Washington that killed several people and shut down Interstate 5 for days. A coastal radar could have provided some advance warning for areas hit hardest by heavy rainfall, Mass said.

The National Weather Service is finally seeing the importance of a new coastal radar and has asked for $7 million in the 2010 US budget. I'm surprised it's taken so long to gain this much support for what seems like a much-needed additional radar. I always thought it was strange that the radar images weren't that great when checking them for storms.