Wednesday Dry Cold Front

The 4-corners (Desert Southwest) high that we talked about a few days ago is still slated to form early this week.  This high, coupled with a Pacific high will cause our temperatures to warm rapidly after our mild 4th of July weekend.  The weather map below is for Tuesday, which will be a rather hot day.

But in the above weather map, there is also a rather deep cold low up in northwest British Columbia.  It will pass by to our north, but it will drag a dry cold front through our area on Wednesday.  This front will bring with it a lot of clouds on Wednesday, perhaps a sprinkle in the north.  

The main effect will be the wind on Tuesday and Wednesday.  The wind, warmth and humidity combination will mean the potential for wind-driven wildfires on both days.  Wednesday will be windier than Tuesday, but Tuesday will be hotter and drier than Wednesday.  Here's the wind forecast (green shading) and wind gust (yellow shading) for Deer Park for the next 10 days.


If you're trying to bale hay this week, it's likely there won't be any dew on Wednesday and Thursday morning.  Best chance for dew will be Monday, Tuesday and Friday or Saturday morning.

Here's the peak wind gust forecast for Tuesday from the European model.  Nothing to get too excited about.



And here's the forecast for Wednesday.  A little windier than Tuesday.



There will be a short cool spell on Thursday, but temperatures will bounce right back to around 90F for the rest of the week.

For the following week, it looks like a battle between the hot 4-corners high and the Pacific jet stream.  The model consensus is that the heat will remain to our south.  So similar to this week, we could see a hot day or two, followed by a breezy cool front.  Here's what the folks at the Climate Prediction Center think for the July 14-20 period.



For those who are curious how June 2025 matched up against historical records, here's how the precipitation looked.  The dark brown areas had their driest June on record.


Some preliminary numbers from specific locations:

  • Lewiston - 0.08" (3rd driest)
  • Pullman - 0.10" (3rd driest)
  • Spokane - 0.13" (4th driest)
  • Davenport - 0.11" (5th driest)
  • Grand Coulee Dam - 0.01" (driest June on record)




Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Showers and Storms this Week

Image
The last week of July is (on average) the hottest week of the summer.  We are looking at 90s Mon-Thu this week, so this may be following the pattern.  The longest day of the year is June 20th, with 16 hours of daylight in Spokane.  By the end of July, we've already lost just over an hour of that.  Not that the length of day is the only factor of hot weather, but it obviously has an effect.  The days noticeably get shorter in August, losing about 3 minutes of sunshine each day. We were talking in the last blog about the potential for showers and thunderstorms this week.  As usual, things are becoming a bit clearer on timing and coverage.   Afternoon and evening thunderstorms will increase over the next few days over eastern Oregon, slowly creeping north each day. By Tuesday, the southern Washington Cascades could see an isolated storm.  Wednesday will see the potential for afternoon thunderstorms over most Washington mountains. Here’s the European ...
Read more

Weather After the Rain

Image
It took some patience, but eventually the rain fell in most places. It doesn’t make up for our dry spell, but it sure helped.  Here’s how much rain fell from the weekend storm.  Here’s a different view of the rainfall over the weekend.  It’s actually pretty close to the forecast graphics I was showing you last week.   So what can we expect for the next 10 days?  Kind of a temperature roller coaster.  After a showery Monday, we’ll warm up quickly on Tuesday, back into the lower to mid 80s.  A mostly dry cool front on Wednesday will bring some mountain showers, breezy winds and cooler temperatures.  We’ll be back in the 70s for Thursday and Friday with more mountain showers over northeast Washington. High pressure from the west will build into our area for the weekend, quickly sending temperatures climbing into the 80s, with 90s by Monday of next week. Beyond this things get more iffy.  There isn’t any clear cut agreement among the compute...
Read more

Uncertain Fourth

Image
In the previous blog I mentioned that there was too much uncertainty in the computer forecasts to look very far into the future. Unfortunately that’s still the case.  I’ve shown the graph below on a previous occasion, but it can be a little confusing so I try not to mention it. So I’ll try to explain. There are three computer centers that produce multiple computer forecasts.  The US, the Canadian, and the European. All together they produce 100 computer forecasts. You can easily average them all together, but this can hide possible scenarios. So another way is to look for clusters of solutions. Below shows four possible scenarios for July 2nd. It doesn’t take a meteorologist to figure out that each one is different.  Some have the hot high pressure (orange color) over the Northwest.  This would bring hot and dry weather.  But the other two have the high pressure to our east.  This would mean a cooler forecast for us, along with a threat of showers. And each...
Read more