Just when you think weather can’t get any crazier …

The amount of weather that has made news in the past week has been unbelievable.

There has been sweltering heat in the East, 500-year floods are menacing the Midwest, the threat of dangerous wildfires continues in the Southwest, tornadoes are ravaging the central plains, and locally we lament over an unseasonably cool June.

I thought it couldn’t get any crazier. And then I looked outside my window, and it was snowing. It was about 8:30 Tuesday morning, and though I was well aware of the possibility of snow in the mountains above 4,000 feet (by itself, a rare occurrence for the month of June) I could do nothing but stare out the window with my mouth hanging open at the huge snowflakes cascading down in my backyard (elevation approximately 2,300 feet).

I thought we had seen the worst of this late spring cold during last weekend’s rain, when highs in the Spokane area barely made it into the 50s, and when Coeur d’Alene and some of the surrounding communities found themselves shivering with afternoon temperatures topping out in the upper 40s. Records didn’t fall en masse, however, until that snowy Tuesday when Spokane’s high was only 49 degrees, beating the record of 55 degrees for the coldest high temperature, last set in 1917.

A record low of 36 was set that morning as well, beating a previous record low of 38 set back in 1973. Coeur d’Alene’s high was 48 degrees. Other cities that broke records for the coldest maximum temperature on Tuesday include Spokane Valley, Moses Lake, Pullman, Omak and Colville in Washington. In Idaho, record cold temperatures were recorded in Priest River, Bonners Ferry, Lewiston, Mullan Pass and Winchester. Of course it is likely that many other locales saw their coldest June temperatures ever, but archived weather data was not available for comparison.

It has been equally chilly on Washington’s West Side. The first week of June was the coldest in Seattle since 1894. In Spokane, though, average highs are supposed to be in the lower 70s, afternoon temps languished in the upper 50s and lower 60s for nearly the first two weeks of the month.

As if the cold temperatures were not enough, record snowfall fell, including 1.5 inches at a cooperative observer site in Pullman. Snow had never previously been observed in the month of June there before. Though only a trace of snow fell at the Spokane airport, it was the latest date ever for such an occurrence.

Now the pressing questions on most people’s minds would be, “Why is this type of weather happening around here?” There are many levels in the answer to that “why” question. In a very broad sense we can first point the finger at La Niña, the cooler than normal waters in the equatorial Pacific, that many times lead to cooler and wetter springs in the Northwest.

That is an incomplete answer, however, as there have been many La Niña episodes in the past couple of decades that did not lead to June snow.

The second level to the answer would be that there was a very deep upper level low pressure system over the Northwest. This is indicative of very cold temperatures in the upper atmosphere, which not only results in colder temperatures at the surface, but frequently unsettled weather as well (rain or snow showers).

Like a young child pestering his mother, one could finally ask “why” such a cold upper-level low pressure system was parked over the Northwest so late in the season. And at that, I could only answer, “because God put it there!”