Summer’S Here, El Nino’S Not Weather Watcher Foresees Normal July And August

Stop blaming El Nino.

The weather phenomenon linked to everything from tornados to Asian dust is no more.

“El Nino is toast. It’s gone,” said professor Bob Quinn of Eastern Washington University, an expert on El Nino.

Because of that, Quinn said he expects Inland Northwest weather to return to normal soon, and that should mean plenty of sunshine in July and August.

Summer officially begins at 7:30 this morning. The now-departed El Nino disrupted weather patterns around the globe over the past year and brought several inches of rain and flooding to the Inland Northwest this spring.

“Now that El Nino is gone, we don’t have to worry about that cool wet summer scenario,” Quinn said.

El Nino is the name given to the abnormal warming of the tropics off the coast of South America, a phenomenon caused by a calming of trade winds near the equator.

For reasons that are not completely clear, El Nino also changes the high-altitude jet stream over the North Pacific, generating more storms.

The El Nino of 1997-98 was the strongest on record this century, and as a result, was slow to dissipate.

But its end came quickly over the past two weeks.

Quinn said water temperatures along the Galapagos Islands off South America dropped 8-10 degrees in just two days.

Ocean water along the West Coast of the United States is returning to normal, and in some locations, is colder than normal.

All of this favors the development of a fair weather pattern over the Inland Northwest this summer, Quinn said, with the hottest weather probably coming in August and early September.

At least one computer model used by the Climate Prediction Center in Washington, D.C., is calling for a reversal of El Nino to what’s called La Nina, or colder-than-normal ocean conditions.

La Nina brings with it wet autumns and hard winters to the Inland Northwest. In fact, it was a mild La Nina that caused the heavy snow and rain in late 1996.

Some of the effects of the most recent El Nino will linger.

Mosquitoes, spiders, ticks and yellow jackets are expected to make a stronger than usual showing over the next few months, thanks mostly to El Nino.

“As a general rule, the milder the winter, the more insects survive,” said John Edwards, an insect physiologist at the University of Washington.

Except for a few days around Christmas and a six-day period from Jan. 8 through Jan 13, last winter’s temperatures were almost balmy.

Sydney McCrea of the Spokane County Master Gardeners program said blight and mildew problems are cropping up in a lot of gardens this season.

“We are seeing lots of aphids, lots of spittle bugs,” she said.

The wet weather also has nourished grasses and herbaceous plants in the region’s wild lands. When those plants dry out this summer, they could add fuel to any fires.

Gary Boyd, a fire dispatcher for the Coeur d’Alene Interagency Dispatch Center, said most forest fires are caused by dry lightning, which is difficult to predict.

In a normal year, the Idaho Panhandle will have about 100 to 120 wildfires, with most of them coming after the Fourth of July.

Firefighters have already had a taste of summer. A small lightning fire was extinguished this week at Skookum Saddle about five miles north of Fourth of July Canyon, Boyd said.

Fire Chief Bruce Holloway in Spokane County District No. 3 said, “If we get rain every two to three weeks things will stay pretty calm.”

In southwest Spokane County, wind-blown fires are the most dangerous, and those are often brought by the passage of a dry cold front and low humidity.

There are still a lot of broken tree limbs on the ground from the ice storm two years ago, he said.

“We do have the fuel potential,” Holloway said.