By PAUL DELANEY
Staff Reporter
When it comes to what to expect with this spring's weather, there's a familiar ring to the prediction Eastern Washington University meteorology professor Bob Quinn offers.
April showers should bring May flowers. And some of those showers could still produce enough snow to further add to this season's all-time record, perhaps pushing totals to the 100-inch mark for the first time since records began back in the late 1800s.
Quinn has resided in EWU's geography department for more than 40 years and is renown for his long-range weather predictions. And while he originally thought back in October that this year would return to more of an average snowfall year – 50 inches – he indicated that if there is anything about Northwest weather, is that it is always uncertain.
He pegged a recent short-term warm-up two weekends ago where temps shot up into the 60s for the first time in 2009, and area residents flocked to anything outside.
But that century-mark for snowfall could once and for all make this the second snow season in a row to serve up huge totals of the white stuff. The snow season runs Oct. 1 through Sept. 30 – it's called a water year – and is a way to keep track of things like snowfall and precipitation, Quinn explained.
“So even though we are running out of time, there is a remote chance we could get one of those nighttime snowstorms. But we're running out of time.”
Is snow possible in April? “Sure it is, but probably two out of three Aprils you don't get any,” Quinn said. Many woke up to snow on Tuesday.
For the short-term forecast, Quinn predicts, “We still have this sort of now dying LaNina pattern,” where sea surface temperatures in the North Pacific cool offering cooler, wetter weather.
What that tends to favor, Quinn explained, is high pressure off to the west. That tightens the storm track up, which brings weather down from the north, northwest. “I think that pattern will continue pretty much to the middle of the month (of April),” Quinn said.
Then, as May rolls around, he said there's likely a pattern change in the works to more of a westerly flow, rather than northwesterly. “What that tends to mean is finally some warmer temperatures,” Quinn said. Precipitation will be normal, a far cry from what we've experienced recently.
“March ended up about an inch above normal and April started off wet and looks like it's going to continue, nowhere near as relentless as March was,” Quinn said. “But we'll certainly continue this cool, about every third or fourth day disturbance pattern. So my guess is April will also end up above normal in terms of precipitation.”
May brings back normal temps and probably near normal to even a hair below normal precipitation, according to Quinn, which a lot of people will welcome, he said.
He sees the whole sea-surface temperature pattern breaking down so for early summer, that forecast is up in the air.
Quinn said his intuitive sense is that it's going to be a warmer than normal June, but not necessarily drier than normal. “You could see the occasional disturbance that gives you the thunderstorm type weather,” he said. “When that happens you get a lot of bang for the buck.”
“The easy answer for summer is, ‘what's summer like in the Northwest? Hot and dry,'” Quinn said. “In other words a normal summer. I don't see anything on the horizon indicating anything extreme,” he added.
Paul Delaney can be reached at pdelaney@cheneyfreepress.com
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