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The Spokesman-Review Newspaper
Spokane, Washington  Est. May 19, 1883

Above normal temps predicted April-June

Michelle Boss

Hard to believe, but a few spring storms in the first week of April pushed Spokane’s seasonal snow total out of the running as the least snowy winter ever.

As of April 7, the Spokane airport had measured 14.4 inches of snow. The previous record for least snowy winter was 14.2 inches in 1980- ’81. This year is currently in second place for the least snowy title, followed closely by the winter of 1900- ’01 which had only 14.5 inches of snow.

Coeur d’Alene is also seeing a winter for the record books. Both January (with 2.4 inches of snow) and February (with .3 inches) are the second least snowy for those particular months. March, with only a trace of snow (less than .01 inches) was tied for the least snowy March. Total snow for the season in Coeur d’Alene as of April 7, was only 18.2 inches.

While March was warmer and drier than normal, April has definitely started on a cool and wet note. Long-term forecasts from the Climate Prediction Center do point to overall above normal temperatures for the April/May/June period, though April itself is forecast to be cooler than normal.

I know that the mild March weather caused spring fever to hit us all hard – but we should welcome this cool, and possibly wetter pattern, as a last chance to pad our dismal mountain snowpack. Even the valleys may see their snow numbers go up this month.

The latest spring storms have not only brought us a few lightning strikes, but showers of graupel as well. Graupel is the stuff falling that has the white appearance of snow, but falls hard like hail. It differs from the hail that we might see in a summertime storm.

Hailstones are made up of layers of ice, while graupel is softer, able to be crushed, and made up of snowflakes that have been coated by supercooled water droplets which then freeze right onto the snowflake. It is also called “soft hail” or “snow pellets,” but as far as precipitation records are concerned, any graupel that falls gets added to our snowfall numbers.

On a historical note, I’m at an age where I remember the days before the Internet, but I’ve never known weather without weather satellite images. On April 1 the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration celebrated the 50th anniversary of the first weather satellite, which was launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla.

Satellite TIROS-1 returned fuzzy images of clouds over the U.S., then a few days later, revealed a typhoon about 1,000 miles east of Australia. The technology has been indispensable ever since, and as NOAA administrator Jane Lubchenco said “… forever changed weather forecasting.”

Michelle Boss can be reached at weatherboss@ comcast.net.