Spring & Summer 2025 Outlook

With the sudden switch to warm and dry weather, many minds are probably on the upcoming spring and summer weather.  So let's take a look at what we can deduce.

First, we have mud season to get through.  Although the air is warm, the ground is still pretty cold, inhibiting surface water soaking in.  The WSU Ag WeatherNet shows 8" soil temperatures in the lower to mid 30s in most of northeast Washington.  But the sunshine will help slowly warm the soil.

Additionally, we're not looking at much precipitation in the next 10 days.  The Pacific storms will be going by to our south, into California.  We have some very low chances of rain starting Sunday, but any rain that does fall should be very light.  

It does appear that rain chances will increase by late next week with temperatures in the mid-upper 40s.  By March 10th, we're probably looking at a cooler and showery weather pattern for a few days, with possibly some spring snow showers and highs only in the lower 40s.  At this point I don't see this being cold enough to be a repeat of the single digit weather we had in early March of last year.  But I wouldn't be putting away my stock tank heaters just yet.

Last year was a dry spring for our area.  The graph below shows the accumulated precipitation (green line) in Deer Park compared to normal (brown line).  We were close to normal from January 1 through early March, but then we started falling behind and never could catch back up to normal.

But last year wasn't necessarily an anomaly.  The graph below shows the total March-April-May precipitation at Deer Park since 2000.  You can see that the last few springs have been on the drier side, especially compared to the really wet springs of 2011 and 2017.

The outlook that the Climate Prediction Center made in February 2024 for the upcoming spring last year did show that temperatures were expected to be warmer than normal while precipitation was going to be less than normal.  So they did a good job last year.

That said, what are they expecting for this spring?  Well, last year we were coming out of a strong El Nino winter.  That was the reason for the dry and mild spring outlook.  This year we had a weak La Nina form in the 2nd half of the winter.  La Nina's tend to have cooler and wetter springs in the Northwest.  As such, the Climate Prediction folks are calling for just that.

These are fairly small areas with low probabilities.  So I wouldn't say it's a slam dunk we're going to have a cool and wet spring.  But I would say that the odds are against a repeat of last year.

May is an important month to farmers, and the weather can be rather variable.  We've seen hot and cold spells.  Here's the average daytime high temperatures each May at Deer Park.  2023 had the warmest May since 2000, while the previous year of 2022 had the coolest May.  Lots of variability.

As for the summer outlook, the Climate Prediction Center folks see another hot and dry summer for us.

As we've talked about in this blog before, the recent trends of warmer and drier summers are hard to deny.  Here's the number of 90+F days at Priest Lake (blue line) and a smoothed trend line (green).  It wasn't that long ago that we had summers that had only a handful of 90+F days.  Now they are common.

And here's the graph for precipitation in July at Priest Lake.  After some wet summers in the 1970s and 80s, we've seen a trend towards drier summers.

If you are a gambler, the safe money is to follow the trend and bet on hot and dry summers in the Inland Northwest.  Could we be surprised by a cool and/or wet summer?  Sure.  You can see in the graphs above that not every summer is hotter and drier than the summer before.  But the odds are against it.