CHENEY – Meteorological spring is easy to pinpoint at it spans the months of March, April and May.
The astronomical version of the season might require a calendar to pinpoint its start, but here’s a hint if you did not already know — it started Thursday, March 19 at 8:50 p.m. and is earlier than it’s been in over a century, according to The Farmer’s Almanac.
Otherwise it might sometimes be hard to know what season is what when it comes to the weather in the Pacific Northwest.
Remember February a year ago? The first several days, not really a hint of winter but starting Feb. 8 when all hell — well snow — broke loose when a dump of 3.9 inches ushered in a record at months end of 29.9 inches.
And there was COLD, real bone-chilling cold, with a string of single-digit lows —12 of them.
That cemented the snow to lawns and parking lots well into March, which in itself came in like a lion with a minus-1 low and another nearly four inches of snow fell on the way to a total of 53.6 inches, well above the 45-inch average.
It took until March 16 for the mercury to hit 50 and finally the snow was on its way to fill lakes and rivers.
Fast-forward a year to February 2020 which felt much more like the traditional March. A number of golf courses got an early start as the month ended with an average high of 42.8 degrees and low of 27.4, a vast improvement over 2019’s average high and low, 28.3 and 14.3 degrees.
“That was more of the traditional sort of interior high pressure, okay, rather than the guy that sets up off the Gulf of Alaska,” retired Eastern Washington University meteorology professor Bob Quinn said. “That pattern will return.”
The difference has been the presence of a high-pressure system off the Washington coast, not inland. And that can cut both ways, as was evident by the snow that fell and cold which descended last weekend, according to Quinn.
The 5.8 inches of snow that fell at the National Weather Service near Spokane International Airport during that event upped the season total to 46.6 inches and gave the station its fourth consecutive above average winter snowfall.
The high sat in a place which allowed the jet stream to travel up its west side and down the east, bringing with it cold Arctic air. “The end result is it will establish a dry, fairly cool northerly flow over us,” Quinn said.
Expect a string of 50-degree temperatures to start spring, but beyond that and into April, the veteran long-term forecaster has deferred to a slightly more-simple tool.
“You got a coin in your pocket?” Quinn asked.
April is absolutely the toughest time to forecast in the Pacific Northwest, he said. The reason is that in the winter there’s a warm ocean and cold land.
“So once the track of storms get going, they tend to form with that pattern and tend to have a fair amount of persistence,” Quinn explained.
On the other hand, with the move into March the land is starting to try to warm up and the ocean is persisting in its colder pattern.
“The end result is that tends to be a very dynamical seasonal time of year,” Quinn said. “Not only then is it very unstable, but equally difficult to forecast.”
That’s why he suggested the coin because one minute it’s 60 degrees and sunshine, but just as quickly, here comes a torrential downpour, or a hearty hail storm.
Reader Comments(0)