I went snowshoeing up at Mirror Lake on Saturday, and I can confirm that there is a TON of snow up there!
Honestly, it’s shocking that we have as much snow as we do in the 3000-5000′ range of the Southern Washington/Northern Oregon Cascades. According to Mark Nelsen’s most recent blog post, the December 1st – February 12th period was the 4th warmest on record for Portland since records began back in 1940. Warm winters are typically the kiss of death for lower elevation snowfall, but not this year!
If you take a look at the graph below, you’ll see there were only a few chilly periods this winter, with the largest one being between January 9-18. Even then, highs and lows never dipped below 40 and 30, respectively.
But that one little chilly period brought us nearly all of our low-elevation snowfall for the season. If it weren’t for that chilly week, we’d be closer to the red line at the bottom, which was mostly the 2014-2015 season. The latest bump in snowpack is due to the snow we had this weekend.
Despite the very warm temperatures, higher elevations have seen lots of snow due to how wet January was. Putting everything together, we get a very favorable snowpack picture for the entire West. The Oregon Cascades are only slightly below normal, and nearly everywhere else across the West is above-normal. Definitely a favorable outlook for summer.
We have a very tranquil week ahead of us as a ridge of high pressure slowly moves over the region. We’ll see beautiful, sunny skies from Tuesday-Thursday, but the air will still be relatively crisp, with highs just reaching the low-mid 50s. It should be a wonderful time for an early spring walk through Forest Park; I went the previous weekend and the buds on some of the lower shrubs were quite prevalent but had not yet opened. I don’t know if the sun this week will open them outright, but it should at least provide a little encouragement!
A deep trough moves over the area next week, giving us another shot of rain, wind, and mountain snow.
However, most models warm us back to near or above-normal temperatures by the following week. While this could certainly change (note the large ensemble spread after 2/26), there’s no doubt that we are beginning to transition out of winter and into spring.
After 11.2 inches from 2016-2017, 7.6 inches from 2017-2018, and 7.0 inches from 2018-2019, Portland Int’l Airport has not seen measurable snowfall so far this winter. I don’t know if it’s time to “stick a fork in winter” quite yet… after all, Portland did see an incredible 5.2 inches of snow on April Fools Day 1936. But it looks pretty likely that the 2019-2020 winter will go down as a snowless one for most folks in the Portland metropolitan area.
Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
Charlie
