White Christmas unlikely in Columbia Basin
MOSES LAKE — Look, maybe all that stuff about snow on Christmas is overrated. Sleighbells ringing and one-horse open sleighs and lanes glistening with snow – hey, who even owns a sleigh any more?
Which is a way of saying it doesn’t look like there will be snow for Christmas 2017. It will be cold though, according to the National Weather Service.
The low for Christmas Eve is forecast to be about 19 degrees, with a high of about 26 degrees on Christmas Day.
But no snow. A ridge of high pressure is expected to build into the region, and “that’s just going to push any moisture out of the region,” said Joey Clevenger, meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Spokane.
“We’ll be cold. (There is) just no moisture to generate snow with.”
The same ridge of high pressure that’s pushing the moisture away is “allowing really cold air to filter in from the north.” It’s definitely North Pole air – the forecast low for Saturday night is 11 degrees.
But Mother Nature has given the region something of a Christmas gift. So far the winter is not the no-good, really bad, very cold and snowy winter of 2016-17. Through Dec. 19, “we haven't had the extreme cold in December like we did last year.” The lowest temperature for December 2017 has been 19 degrees, compared with below-zero temperatures by the same time in December 2016.
“We haven’t had that real cold spell, just yet,” Clevenger said.
The winter of 2017-18 “is supposed to be a ‘La Niña’ year, which means colder and wetter.” It’s a change in water currents in the central Pacific Ocean, which has an effect on weather patterns half a hemisphere away. The locals – Peruvian fishermen – were the first to notice it, back in the 17th century; hence its Spanish name.
La Niña weather typically means colder and wetter than average, but what matters is where “average” sits. For December, Clevenger said, the average low is about 22, so “lower than average” means lower than that. The region’s 90-day outlook is following that forecast, calling for, well, colder than average temperatures and higher than average precipitation.
The 2017-18 water year starts in October, and while precipitation is lower than average for December, it’s above average for the water year to date, he said.
Cheryl Schweizer can be reached via email at education@columbiabasinherald.com.
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