Inland Northwest Hay Weather

  Things have changed a little in the forecast, enough to warrant an update.  And we’re actually talking about rain showers. The first chance is coming up later this week.  A weak atmospheric wave will form over our area on Wednesday afternoon. The weather map below shows this small area of blue over Washington.  This, along with some moisture coming in from the west, will lead to the formation of showers and thunderstorms over the mountains of northeast Washington.  Yes, I did say thunderstorms unfortunately.  Here’s the lightning forecast from the European model on Wednesday afternoon   The winds aloft will be out of the north. This could bring the remnants of the thunderstorms southward to near Spokane on Wednesday evening.  Probably only few hundredths at best for lower elevations. The same scenario plays out on Thursday afternoon and evening. After a dry weekend, the weather pattern is looking a little more promising for rain showers and thun...

After a bone dry July, I think most folks would like to see some August rains. Any chance of that?  Unfortunately there’s only a very small chance.  In the meantime, we’re looking at a week or more of dry days. Here’s the chance of rain over the next 10 days at Deer Park.  Only a 10% chance of something around the 14th.  And nothing heavy. In the meantime, we’re going back into a warm and breezy pattern. Friday will be the hottest day, and then a gradual cooling trend. The gradual cool down means that we probably won’t see a strong windy event. But we will still see breezy afternoons for the next week as a westerly jet stream sets up overhead. This is the wind forecast for Spokane.  Gusts to 20 mph each day for the next week.  Our atmosphere will continue to be very dry.  Drier than August usually is, with dew points in the 30s. This will allow our nighttime temperatures to continue to fall into the 40s.  But with such low dew points, it will cont...

Some may not have noticed, but it’s been a very dry July.  Officially at the Spokane Airport, they haven’t measured anything more than a sprinkle. Has there ever been a July with no rain at all?  Technically it’s happened only once in Spokane, and that was way back in 1883.  There’s been 15 Julys like this year where only a sprinkle fell the entire month. The same happened in 2017, 2013, 2008 and 2003. To be fair, other locations in the Inland Northwest did receive rain. But mostly it was less than 0.10”. The exception was in the Colville area. I showed this chart a couple of years ago at the Northeast Washington Hay Growers meeting. The blue line is the July rainfall each year at Spokane, while the green line sort of a moving average. Between 1975 and 2000 there were several wet Julys.  But since that time, July rainfall has really fallen off to the point where it’s pretty much nonexistent.  In case you’re wondering, August shows the same thing. You may have no...

We have a few more days of heat before cooler weather arrives this weekend. Here’s the current weather map.  High pressure over the central US is nosing into the Northwest, giving us our current heat.  Kind of a strange pattern. There are two low pressure area of note in the map above.  One is off the California coast, while the other is way up north, west of Alaska.  These two will combine for a broad area of low pressure off the northwest coast, pushing the heat to our east by the weekend. As usual, the transition from heat to cooler weather will come with some related weather. Wednesday: hottest day of the week with temperatures 95-100. Thursday: Showers and thunderstorms are predicted to move through the area Thursday morning.  More showers and thunderstorms could develop over the northern mountains in the afternoon.  Precipitation amounts should be very light. Less than 0.10”.  A bit of a breeze in the late afternoon and through the night which wi...

Our monsoonal moisture surge is just about over, and it played out pretty close to expected. Lots of clouds early in the week, ending with stronger thunderstorms and showers toward the end of the event.  Here’s a map of the lightning strikes over the past 48 hours.  That’s a lot of lightning. Numerous wildfires have undoubtedly started. Time will tell how much of an issue they become.  Smoke was already an issue this morning.  The HRRR model expects this to continue tonight. Here’s its forecast: But by tomorrow night, the smoke plume should be pointed more into Montana.  We will cool down a bit for the weekend, but then the heat will return.  However, the moisture is not expected to make a reappearance.  Earlier computer forecasts predicted another moisture surge, but have since backed off of this idea. The result will be cooler nighttime temperatures. Instead of the balmy 60s we’ve had the past couple of nights, our lows will drop into the 50s and eve...

Things are getting hot and a little humid out there thanks to our southerly monsoonal flow. And they’re about to get a little wet. In the previous blog I mentioned a small stationary low off the Washington coast that was predicted to move across northwest Washington on Thursday. That is still the plan. And when it does, it will draw monsoon moisture into it, creating rain and thunderstorms, but mainly west of the Cascades.  But on Thursday night and Friday morning there could be a second impulse that could bring showers and storms to northeast Washington. Here’s the predicted rainfall for this event from the European model: You can see mostly light amounts of rainfall (less than 0.10”) for northeast Washington.  There’s an equal chance that we will see no rainfall or just sprinkles. This will knock our temperatures back a bit from the near 100F on Thursday. But it looks like we’ll stay in the 90s through the end of the month. We’ll also see some drier air, allowing our low tem...