Inland Northwest Hay Weather

Perhaps the best measure of how mild this "winter" has been so far is this:  Deer Park airport has yet to have a low below 20F.  That hasn't happened since daily data was measured at Deer Park starting in 1998.  The coldest night at Deer Park was 20F on October 18th! OK, I know.  That's only 26 years of records.  What about Spokane Airport?  The coldest low so far this winter for them is 24F set on the 2nd of December.  The last time it took this long for the Spokane Airport to have a temperature below 24F was in 1953!  Yes, you read that right.   But here's the funny thing about the winter of 1953/54.  Through December, Spokane had only 5.9" of snow for the season.  But when the calendar changed to January 1954, the weather pattern changed as well.  Spokane got hammered with 46.5" of snow that January.  So as we all know, things can change quickly. Turning our attention to the last 11 days of 2024, it looks like the ...

After another snow-changing-to-rain event, our ground is pretty much bare again.  In fact, most of the lower 48 states don't have much snow on the ground.  The biggest exception is around the Great Lakes (the result of lake-effect snow) and the high terrain of the West, with just a light dusting in eastern Montana on over to Minnesota and Iowa. But we should get a few inches of snow on Monday.  The ECMWF model isn't very excited about this event, giving Spokane just under an inch. The GFS model is a bit more excited, with 2.4" forecast for Spokane.  But throughou t this fall and early winter, the GFS has been over-forecasting snow. The snow should start early Monday morning and last much of the day. But as you can see in the image above, after that Monday snow, the precipitation most likely turns to rain again, even into next weekend and the following week.

Last year's Brown Christmas wasn't a surprise, given that it was an El Nino winter.  But we had higher hopes for this Christmas.  Still, the ground is bare out the window with only 2 weeks until Christmas. We will be seeing some weak storms bring us some moisture over the next few days.  The first of these storms should arrive Thursday afternoon or evening.  This isn't good timing for snow.  But it does look like we'll start off dry enough to give us a little snow.  Probably less than an inch by Friday morning.  And some computers don't give us any snow at all. The problem, as you can see above, is that after our 50% chance of snow, the computers expect the precipitation to change to rain with the next system on Friday night and Saturday.  Temperatures are expected to be in the upper 30s on Saturday, with 1/4" to 1/2" of rain. There is another weak system due early next week that could bring us a little snow.  But again, it's a low chance....

I'm guessing that even those folks who don't like snow still look forward to having a white Christmas.  So is there any chance of seeing some snow in the future? Currently we're still locked into our strong high pressure pattern in the West, with cold and snow back East.  This pattern isn't unusual at all during the winter.  The strong events usually last a couple of weeks, like this one.   In the short term, we do have a couple of weather systems forecast to arrive in the next few days.  The first system is so weak, it's barely worth mentioning.  It's doubtful we'll see any precipitation from it at all, except for perhaps some freezing drizzle on Thursday.  The second system is stronger and it will bring us some weather on Saturday.   But you can see that high pressure is already building right behind this system, and it will move into our area on Sunday.  This will bring us more dry weather next week. Will we see any snow on Satur...

I think most folks are familiar with the idea that temperatures turn colder after the passage of a storm. The Norwegians were the first group to figure out why this was, and they developed the well known ideas of warm fronts and cold fronts a little over 100 years ago.  But there are other ways you can have big temperature changes from one day to the next. And these last few days were a classic example of Inland Northwest weather. Since Thanksgiving, we’ve had cloudy days with cold temperatures right around freezing. Here’s the high temperatures last Friday. But then on Sunday, the skies cleared (in some areas) and the temperatures warmed into the lower 40s.  But you’ll notice that there were plenty of folks who were stuck in the mid 30s. The reason? The clouds weren’t removed, just pushed into other areas by the northeast winds.  Here’s a satellite picture from Sunday. Spokane is the red circle on the map. Note that while skies were sunny there and to the north and east,...