Spring is here, more or less
Cheryl Schweizer/Columbia Basin Herald Yellow tulips blaze in the sun Friday afternoon. Clouds and rain could return by Tuesday.
MOSES LAKE — If it seems like it’s been raining more than usual this spring – well, it has, at least in April.
Not a whole lot more rain, at least by the averages compiled by the National Weather Service. As of Friday, Grant County had received about an inch of rain (0.94) during the first three weeks in April. The average is about seven-tenths of an inch, according to the National Weather Service.
Spring weather being unsettled, it’s probably not a surprise that temperatures are lower in April 2017 than they were in 2016. A lot lower, as a matter of fact. In April 2016 temperatures topped out in the 80s some days. As of Friday, the high temperature for April 2017 “peaked out at a whopping 56 (degrees),” said Laurie Nisbet, meteorologist with the NWS in Spokane.
Clouds and a chance of rain are in the NWS forecast, at least through Wednesday. In Grant County normal temperatures for late April-early May are about 60 degrees, Nisbet said. The temperatures forecast for the last week of April are slightly below that.
Mother Nature is trying. She really is. The grass is green, lawn mowers are out, the tulips are blooming, People have started to clean up the leftover vegetation from last winter and plant summer flowers.
So the warm weather – say, 70 degrees, even 75 degrees – is taking its sweet time, and that trend is projected to continue in May, at least the first half of May. Temperatures are forecast to be below normal for the entire state for the first three weeks of May, Nisbet said.
The picture is a little murkier when it comes to precipitation. Forecasters don’t know yet what’s going to happen, she said.
Weather on land is affected by changes in ocean currents and temperatures – El Niño being an example – and those ocean oscillations had an impact on the 2016-17 terrible, horrible, no good, very bad winter. They will not have as much impact on spring and summer – if they have any impact at all, Nisbet said. The effect fades in spring and summer.
Beyond the first half of May the whole picture is a little murky, but the 60- to 90-day outlook, which takes in June and July, is forecasting normal to maybe even above-normal temperatures, “back up to what we normally would expect for the area.”
Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.