Inland Northwest Hay Weather

Yes, it’s that time of year again. And if you’ve paid attention to the forecast, you’ve seen the dreaded (or delightful) word: snow. Is there really a chance of it?  Actually, there are two chances. At this time of year, timing is critical. If the clouds move in too early at night, we don’t cool down enough for snow. If the precipitation starts too late in the morning, it will be too warm for snow.  Our first chance of snow will be early tomorrow (Thursday morning). Clouds will increase about 7pm this evening and Precipitation will start about midnight. This isn’t good timing for snow. The wild card in this mix is that the air will be drier, with dew points around 30F, which is good for snow. If there is any of the white stuff on Thursday morning, it’s doubtful it will accumulate on the ground. Steady precipitation should end around 7am with about 0.15” of liquid.  We’ll have a short break before the next, stronger storm arrives Thursday night. The clouds and precipitatio...

It’s the most often asked question at this time of year: what’s the winter going to be like?  Seasonal outlooks are what I call “educated guesses”. They’re not just the flip of a coin.  There is a lot of science behind them. But their accuracy is only a little better than a coin flip.  For winter outlooks, the focus is on whether it is an El Niño, La Niña or neutral conditions in the equatorial waters of the Pacific. There are a lot of other things that come into play, but these are all in the atmosphere. And we currently can only predict the atmosphere out for about two weeks. But the oceans are much slower to react, and so we can make confident forecasts for them several months into the future.  Last winter was a great example. It was an El Niño winter, and as expected, this brought mild conditions to the Inland Northwest.  Overall. But there was a week of brutal cold in the middle of January. But when you looked at the entire winter, it was warmer than normal...

Back in July during our hot stretch of days, I looked to see if there was any trend in how hot our summers were.  You can view that blog here . In that article, I also took a quick look at precipitation trends for the the summer, that is, for June, July and August.  But given our long wait for autumn rains this year, I wanted to take a little closer look at the warm season rains. As we've discussed before, June is really a springtime month in the Inland Northwest, although there have been some recent exceptions.  Our dry season is definitely the three months of July, August and September.   See the green bars in the graph below. And each year it's a common question: when will the fall rains arrive, ending the wildfire and dust seasons?  Sometimes that's a widespread event. But most years are like this year.  Some areas received rain, while others are still waiting.  Here's the map of yesterday's rainfall. So has there been any trend with precipita...