Spring's record cold, precipitation have made area snowpack massive
By PAUL DELANEY
Staff Reporter
Did you like that little taste of shorts and sunglasses weather last week? While it seems like a fleeting memory after some recent gully-washing rains, rest assured that warmth will return.
Honest.
Old Man Winter's grip, which has held on well into spring, is finally loosening. With spring nearly eight weeks late, it may finally be time to get those gardens ready, the bikes out and begin thinking of comfy temperatures that have so far eluded us.
“This has been more or less a continuation of our La Nina winter,” longtime Eastern Washington University meteorology professor Dr. Robert Quinn said. This past April's 41.5 degree average temperature was the second coldest on record behind that of 1955's 40.6. This is the third La Nina winter in the past four.
This April was a whopping 5 degrees colder on average and its 1.81 inches of precipitation was .53 inches above normal, Quinn reported. March, by comparison, was minus .2 degrees below normal but was 1.72 inches above the norm in precipitation.
The last stab winter took at spring came Friday, April 29 when an early morning snowstorm coated Cheney with an inch of snow. The area has recorded 69 inches of snow over the winter of 2010-11. Normal is 45 and last year's El Nino lightly dusted us with just 14.4 inches.
“Part of it is due to the fact that there is a large cool water pool off the West Coast,” Quinn explained. “The end result was having these storms forming up in the Gulf of Alaska. They come zinging down and maintain their cold characteristics as they drop down over the cool water pool.”
North Pacific sea surface temperatures have been the culprit, Quinn said.
It's a combination of near-record cold temps, blended with precipitation that has seen our mountain snowpacks show huge gains in a time when they normally began to melt off. After a quick start back in November building up of those snow totals that are so vital to agriculture, power production and recreation took a vacation through much of the winter.
On March 1, Snotel measuring sites in Washington and Idaho mountains that feed various area rivers in the spring showed snow-water equivalency hovering at – or slightly above – 100 percent. By the first week of May the same sites were over 160 percent. Compare that to a year ago where the Idaho Panhandle was at just 80 percent and the Spokane River basin a paltry 64 percent.
“Virtually every month has been above normal, including March,” Quinn said.
“You have water everywhere. The wetlands are full, the lakes are full, but even a wet fan like myself, finally, enough is enough.”
While the abundant water will serve agriculture and the general growing season well, the cold has delayed the growing season by weeks.
“I take my wetlands class out and normally the first shrubs to bloom are the service berries – they are usually blooming at the end of March, early April – they just started to bloom this week,” Quinn said. Everything is three to four weeks behind what it normally is, he explained.
There is finally a pattern change with the next trough of low pressure predicted to dig down off the West Coast and sit off of Southern California. That builds a ridge of high pressure, a southerly flow and the long-awaited warmer weather.
This winter has been one of those quirky ones elsewhere too, Quinn said. “Typical La Nina winters, the Northwest is cool and wet and Southern California is more or less warm and dry. But about one in every four La Nina's is such that the whole West Coast is wet and that's exactly what's happened with this one. You look at the Sierra snowpack and my God, it's 150 percent of normal.”
From here on out “You'll still see a storm coming down from the Gulf of Alaska from time to time, and of course that puts us into our good old thunderstorm season,” Quinn said.
It's not going to be bone dry but Quinn sees the area at an end of what he called, “This miserable cold.”
Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com.
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