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Unseasonably hot Temperatures Forecast for weekend
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Temperatures more typical of August appear to be in store for Northeast Oregon in the next few days. The center of a high pressure ridge will be tracking across the region from Thursday through Saturday, cranking up the ambient thermostat to well over 80 degrees. La Grande’s high on Friday is currently predicted at 86 degrees; on Saturday, the area may be just under 90. Forecasts for the Wallowa Valley have the high temperatures about four degrees lower. Dennis Hull, a warning coordination meteorologist with the National Weather Service office in Pendleton, said upper-level ridges can sometimes generate such unseasonable weather. “With an upper-level ridge, we have warm temperatures throughout the atmosphere, and this time of year, this enables the warm temperatures down at the surface,” he said. While the heating trend is predicted to be temporary — by Tuesday, the Grande Ronde Valley should be back in the upper 60s — NWS, in a special weather statement released this morning, predicts accelerated snowmelt across the region. The statement notes that the Grande Ronde River, as well as central Washington’s Naches and Yakima rivers, may swell to their highest levels yet. Mike Burton, district conservationist with the USDA’s Natural Resource Conservation Service in La Grande, said, “We’ll see a bump, I think,” in the river graphs. But he said it was difficult to predict the rate of snowmelt. The scattered rainshowers of the past couple of days probably didn’t have a huge effect on snowpack melting, he said, unless precipitation was heavier in the high country. “It was a refreshing rain, but it wasn’t something that was going to significantly impact flows,” predicted Burton. As of this morning, La Grande’s 24-hour rainfall total was 0.11 inches. Warm rain on snowpack, coupled with substantially higher temperatures, is often a recipe for faster rates of melting. NWS is not predicting widespread flooding, and neither is Burton. He said low-lying areas typically inundated during peak river flows may see water. He did note that the sloughs and wetlands of lower Catherine Creek and Ladd Marsh, which constitute a flood buffer zone, were holding fairly high water. Hull said that May was still forecasted, on balance, to be cooler and drier than average. Bouts of hot weather like this weekend’s, however, have been fairly consistently seen in recent years in May. “It probably seems more unusual because we’ve had such a cool spring,” he noted. |
