Weather for Spring and Summer Pt 3

I’m Bob Larson. The weather for the rest of our spring and the summer ahead looks to be warmer and a bit drier than normal, but the mountain snowpack looks to be healthy enough to get us through.

Washington State Climatologist Nick Bond says the drier weather has already showed itself in the form of nice warm days and cooler nights …

BOND … “For April there, for much of the month, it was on the dry side, definitely. And so, what that meant was, you know, the days were okay, but the nights were definitely chilly. And that’s the time of year if you have a clear night it’s going to get cold and, you know, wide-spread frost even west of the Cascades before in April.”

But, Bond says the cold nights should be behind us …

BOND … “We’ve been looking at a warmer than normal summer for a while and, just to kind of summarize, now there seems to be a little bit better evidence that it’s going to be on the dry side too, with the whole realization that we do a lot better at forecasting temperatures at extended variations than precipitation and so there’s a big caveat.”

Bottom line, Bond says growers have bigger worries than the weather this year …

BOND … “It’s all going to be about the market, it’s probably not going to be the environment that’s going to be what the agricultural community is talking about.”

He says this past weekend was just a taste of things to come.