Inland Northwest Hay Weather

A much-advertised front will move through the inland Northwest tomorrow (Friday). A few days ago this was looking like a rather wet system. But now the consensus is a bit drier.  And windier.  Here’s the latest precipitation average of all of the various computer models. About 0.10” along I-90  in eastern Washington.  More to the north, less to the south. The rain should reach Moses Lake around 6am and Spokane by 10am, and should last about 3-4 hours.  Behind the front, strong gusty winds will develop.  This is the peak wind forecast from the European model. Gusts in the Basin to 45 mph.  Depending on how much rain the Basin gets, this kind of wind could create some blowing dust.  There would also be some afternoon showers north of I-90. Possibly even a thunderstorm. After this storm, daytime temperatures will hang out in the 60s for a week.  There will also be small chances of rain from typical fall fronts next week. This is the chance of ra...

Today marks the last full day of astronomical summer. The fall equinox occurs Tuesday at 5:05pm. So I thought it was a good opportunity to look back at our summer. Was it a hot one? Here’s the temperature ranking for June-July-August across the contiguous 48 states.  The Four Corners area had its warmest summer on record (going back to 1895), as well as South Florida and San Diego.  Somewhat interesting, since there wasn’t a ton of media attention on a hot summer this year. For the Northwest, it was warmer than normal, but nothing record breaking.  I’m actually a little surprised by this.  To me, this summer was about average, temperature-wise  I actually prefer to measure a summer by the number of days that reached 90F or hotter.   At Spokane airport the thermometer reached at least 90F on 17 days this summer, compared to an average of 20 such days.  That’s the lowest total since 2019. At Deer Park airport, there were 22 days of at least 90F, compared...

It’s already been a wet a cool September. And we have another wet storm on the way.  A few notes: Usually storms in September are weak, bringing only very light rain. This upcoming weekend storm is much stronger than normal for mid September.  The storm is also moving rather slowly, giving most locations about 24 hours of rainfall. The track of the storm is on a line from around Salem, OR to Spokane.  All of these factors mean a wetter and more widespread rain event. Even folks in the Basin will see decent amounts of rain.  In fact, it’s possible that the driest locations in the state could get the most rainfall.  Here’s a few of the historically most accurate weather computers and their rainfall forecasts for this event.  What should jump out at you is that they’re all pretty similar. We’ve seen other events where the computers are all over the place. Not this time. When the computers all agree like this, confidence is very high.  Here’s a zoomed in f...

The first seven days of September have been unusually cool and wet. Typically the warm dry summer weather extends until at least the Labor Day weekend, and often longer. But not this year. Fall came on suddenly. But will it last all month?  It’s safe to say that we’re done with the 90s for the summer, but we might still eke out a few 80s.  First, here’s a graph showing the first week of September rainfall at Spokane going back to 1881. Yes, this has been wetter than recent Septembers. But historically, the first seven days of this month have been a lot wetter over the years.  The culprit?  Could be El Niño. Could be tropical cyclone Lala. We’ll never know.  Here’s the weather map for last Friday. That’s an impressively large, cold low over the western US.  By Wednesday of this week, the low will be gone and high pressure will make a brief appearance. But there a storm up in western Canada, just east of Alaska, waiting to drop into our area.  This ...