Spring incoming: high temperatures 15 degrees above normal this week

MOSES LAKE — Snow, high temperatures in the low 40s, windy, cold, clouds and more clouds – what, is spring stuck on the pass or something? Actually, temperatures are expected to rise and approach 75 degrees by Thursday. 

“It’s springtime, so we’re definitely in the season of change,” said Joey Clevenger, meteorologist for the National Weather Service office in Spokane. 

It’s forecast to start getting warmer Monday, with a high temperature of about 60 degrees, and to keep going up from there, with a potential high of 72 degrees by Thursday.  

That’s not to say it’s going to be sunny – it's not. It’s forecast to be mostly cloudy all week. 

Warmer temperatures are forecast throughout the Pacific Northwest, possibly breaking records in some locations. That’s less likely in the Columbia Basin, Clevenger said, but high temperatures locally will be about 15 degrees above normal. 

The reason is a weather pattern that’s persisted all winter, with high pressure in a location where it’s normally absent at this time of year, he said. The cold and snowy weather was the result of a low pressure system that moved south from Canada. 

“Starting late this weekend that high pressure will build back into the region, push out the cold air and bring in the warm air,” Clevenger said. 

Rachel Fewkes, NWS Spokane meteorologist, said Tuesday the warm temperatures could come with more rain. 

“A warm and wet period is expected early to (the middle of) next week,” she said.  

While rain is forecast for other parts of region, the Columbia Basin is supposed to be cloudy all week long.  

The heavy snow that fell in the Cascades last week did increase the snowpack, at least a little, but, Clevenger said, not enough. 

“The snow water equivalent numbers have come up, but it could be one of those situations where it could be too little, too late,” he said.  

As of Friday, the heavy snow had added the equivalent of about 1.7 inches of water to the snowpack near Wenatchee, he said. However, he said, that area would require about nine inches of snow water equivalent to get to average levels.  

According to a March 1 press release from the Bureau of Reclamation, the snow water equivalent in the Yakima basin was about 33% of average. The amount of precipitation between October 2025 and February 2026 in that area was about 107% of average, the press release said.  

But Clevenger said in an earlier interview that the precipitation that fell across the region in late 2025 and early 2026 was rain. High pressure doesn’t usually hang around the Columbia Basin in the winter, but this winter it did, and that meant a lot of warm air coming from the south.  

Colder air did flow into the region in January, but it didn’t have much moisture attached, he said. 

It’s too early to tell what that will mean for fire season.  

“It just depends on how hot we get, and how quickly,” Clevenger said.  

As of now, the three-month outlook for late spring into early summer shows gradual warming trends, Clevenger said, but that’s still tentative.  

“(The forecast trend) is right in the middle,” he said. “We could go either way.”