Inland Northwest Hay Weather

I realize everyone is busy cutting, raking and baling. I just wanted to quickly draw your attention to a potential weather hazard on Tuesday. Not rain, but wind.  A weak weather system will pass by to our north on Tuesday. This will cause winds to gust in excess of 40 mph in some areas, possibly 50 mph in the Basin. Here’s the European computer forecast for Tuesday afternoon wind gusts.  This kind of wind could play havoc with windrows of hay.   Also, for those who live where the fine grasses have cured, this could pose a potential wildfire threat.   This storm system could bring a few showers to the northern Panhandle on Wednesday. Aside from that, the weather looks dry this week.  Small chances of rain don’t show up until Monday the 22nd and continue through much of next week.  Too far out to make any plans around, until we get a bit closer to the potential event.  

I’m guessing most of you know what I mean by the term “cold pocket”. There’s just some locations that nearly always seem to be colder than the surrounding areas. While this tends to happen more in areas of varied terrain, it can happen just about anywhere. So why do cold pockets exist?  Mainly it has to do with those locations where the wind goes calm at night.  This allows the atmosphere to cool without the wind mixing in warmer air from above.  And it’s usually not obvious why a location likes to go calm at night. Additionally, the direction of the wind plays a role. Some locations go calm except if this wind is from a certain direction. The Inland Northwest has a lot of these cold pockets. And our recent June cold snap showed a number of them. When I started with the Weather Service in Spokane 30 years ago, we had very few weather observations.  Mainly just the airports. But that included the Deer Park airport.  And so we knew that Deer Park was a cold pocke...

Our mid-June rainstorm is over. Some locations picked up significant rainfall.  Drier air is moving into the region. This will allow our temperatures on Thursday morning to drop into the 30s once again .  But then the steady warming trend begins. The warmth should peak around 90 by next Tuesday before temperatures cool off some. As we talked about in the last blog, the position of the high pressure offshore leaves us open to weather systems from the northwest. We’ll see one of those on Friday, but the threat of showers should be minor and mainly confined to north of Newport.  Here’s the European rainfall forecast for Friday.  The next small chance of rain looks to be around the 20th of June.  It also looks like it could get a little breezy next week.  Dew points look like they will stay in the 40s, which will mean afternoon humidity around 25%, and not a heavy morning dew.

The forecast from my previous blog entry is pretty much holding course. The 30F reading this morning at Deer Park airport definitely adjusted our climate clocks. It is June after all. And it’s been 14 years since Deer Park as seen such a cold morning this late in the spring. But now our attention turns to the upcoming rain. The computers have come into overall agreement. It doesn’t look like this is going to be a stalled low pressure system with unpredictable bands of rain over a few days. Rather, it’s looking more like a quicker event. Confidence is very high that it will be raining before sunrise on Tuesday, and it will continue most all the day. It should be done by Wednesday morning.  Here’s the forecast for the next 10 days. Amounts range from 0.25” to 0.75” depending on your location and which model you believe. But  suffice to say, you don’t want to have hay down if you can avoid it.  Here’s few computer forecasts.  Lastly, the Model Blend forecast is more bea...

It’s that time of year when we stop rooting for a good rain storm and instead hope for a week of dry weather. So you’re probably looking at your favorite weather app and seeing something like this: Should you ignore the forecast for next week and start cutting now?  The alfalfa is already starting to bloom. The chance of rain on Saturday probably won’t be enough to worry about.  The storm is coming at us from the northwest, which is typically not a favorable direction for precipitation around here. Below is a computer forecast of precipitation.  Should be less than 0.10”, unless you live north of Colville and Sandpoint.  But it will bring dry air so the Sunday morning low temperature will probably be in the 30s. The bigger question is the rain for next week.  Here’s the forecast weather map for next Tuesday. That pattern looks cool and possibly wet.  Why do I say “possibly”?  This looks like it will be another spring storm.  We’ve talked about the...

The critical rains of May turned out to be somewhat of a mixed bag. The graph below shows precipitation at Deer Park for the current May (green line), May of 2025 (purple line), and an average May (brown line).  May 2026 featured two long dry spells, but with good rains in the middle and and of the month.  But the total was half an inch below normal.  Compare that to last year which also had two long dry spells and ended with nearly the exact same total.  The biggest difference is that last year was dry during the last half of the month. Looking at the entire region, the story was much the same.  Except for a couple of isolated locations, the entire state (actually nearly all of the Northwest) was well below normal for its rainfall in May. So what can we expect for June weather?  The climate prediction center updated their outlook, but it’s still not an encouraging prediction.  Drier and warmer than normal for the Northwest. All of the climate computer...