Winter 2023-24 Recap

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 years.



This event is a great example of how a few days does not a winter make.  

For precipitation, the winter was a bit of a mixed bag.  The mountains suffered the largest precipitation deficits.  But some of the lower elevations actually had above normal precipitation.






We can look at a few specific locations below.  The green line is the actual precipitation accumulation through the winter; the brown line is what is considered normal precipitation at that location.  So if the green line is above the brown line, then precipitation is above normal, and vice versa.

For Spokane, the precipitation is strikingly close to normal.


Colville precipitation is also very close to normal.



Deer Park precipitation is actually running a bit behind normal.



Mountain snow pack typically peaks around April 1st.  Looking at the current snow pack, we see that overall things are below normal.



At a couple of locations (Bunchgrass Meadows in Pend Oreille county, and Quartz Peak on Mount Spokane), the black line (current snow pack) is below the normal, green line.  It's not the worst snow pack ever, but it will melt off earlier than normal. 




The warm 60s are over and we're now looking at a few cool and showery days with another round of rain in the middle of next week.  But this rain isn't a sure bet, and the storm could easily go south of us.  After that, we are looking at drier and warmer weather next weekend.

The computer climate models still expect a warmer than normal spring and summer, but near-normal precipitation.


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