Switch in winter's dry weather pattern will not be enough to fix our precipitation problems
By PAUL DELANEY
Staff Reporter
If Eastern Washington University professor of meteorology Bob Quinn is correct it's going to be a good year to be a firefighter and a bad one for those who make their money river rafting.
As the El Nino conditions that have brought us another record-setting winter – this one being a season of historically sparse snowfall – began to weaken, Quinn worked his weather Ouija board and sees a rough spring and summer ahead.
“El Ninos are pretty consistent in terms of being warmer than normal winters and low snowfall winters and usually dry,” Quinn said. He along with others predicted back in October that an El Nino winter would drench California, yet leave the Pacific Northwest high and dry.
After winters where the area experienced record high snowfalls of nearly 100 inches in both 2008 and 2009, this winter which officially ends March 20, will barely top 12 inches.
And the effects promise to have some catastrophic consequences. With the lower moisture values fire danger is going to be extremely high, according to Quinn. And it's going to come early because the mountains are going to dry out early.
“Our total precipitation numbers are below normal,” Quinn said. “They're not excessively so, probably 70 percent or something like that.”
But the mountain snow pack is much worse Quinn pointed out. “If you look at all the Snotel sites that are all running 50 to 70 percent,” he explained. “And even those numbers are still not low enough. Snotel sites are typically located at about 4,500 feet and a lot of them are above 5,000.”
There's a huge area in the mountains that's between 3,000 to 4,000 feet. “Basically there's no snow there,” Quinn explained.
A Snotel site is a remote cluster of instruments that gathers snowpack information and water content.
If the Snotel numbers are pretty grim, the current snow pack totals are even more so. The Spokane River basin sits at just 49 percent according to a check of Monday's Snotel readings. And at this point in the season there's little chance of getting any significant boost.
“That bodes for all kinds of problems with respect to runoff, power generation, fish passage, irrigation, river rafting,” Quinn said.
Paul Green, an EWU professor of recreation who teaches river rafting in the spring, just called Quinn to get his yearly river flow report. “I said man. You're in bad shape. Go early as you can.”
Quinn noted it's interesting to see what's currently going on in the larger river systems like the Columbia and Snake.
“Right now if you go down to the typical launch site it's always frustrating because they are always lowering (the reservoirs) like crazy,” he said. “Now what they're doing is they're not doing that because they're realizing we don't have a big spring runoff coming so we better get ready to hold some of this water for later in the summer.”
As the current moderate El Nino weakens a shift in the weather pattern – that to a more westerly flow – is predicted. That means, “We have normal precipitation and slightly cooler than normal temperatures.” That will do nothing, however, to correct the snow pack and runoff situation, Quinn suggested.
“The only thing that it tends to do in drought years is to save the farmer's butts,” he said. “It will give them some much needed soil moisture in spring when they need it,” Quinn said. “Sometimes it can help the wetlands, which if you look around, they're in pretty bad shape.”
So it's unlikely that this spring will mirror what Quinn called, “monster drought years,” like those seen in1976-77 where the winter drought continued into spring.
“That one ended up having major impact on wheat yields and had huge impact on resources, runoff, power generation and recreation,” he said.
Paul Delaney can be reached at [email protected].
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