Inland Northwest Hay Weather

With the winter now definitely in our rear-view mirror, it's a good time to look back and summarize the winter as a whole.  In October, we wrote a blog providing an outlook for the upcoming winter .  A strong El Nino was expected and so the outlook closely mimicked what we normally see in those kinds of winters.  In summary, this meant a mild winter for the Northwest with drier than normal conditions.  This was also the outlook given by the computer climate models.   The image below shows how each state's average temperature ranked over the past 129 winters.  As you can see, all 48 states were warmer than normal.  And a handful of states in the north experienced their warmest winter since 1895.  This was largely as expected due to the strong El Nino. In the Northwest, conditions overall were also mild.  This is despite an impressive cold snap in mid-January was wasn't very El Nino-like. Temperatures on 12-13 January were some of the coldest the Inland Northwest had seen in