People across the Pacific Northwest are beginning to get very worried. The spring of 2021 has been the driest on record since March 1 in many places. PDX has received only 2.01″ of rainfall as of May 14.  Normal for the first 2 1/2 months of spring is 7.97″!  Generally spring rain tapers off very gradually between February and June.  But not this year.

March was about as dry as a normal June, and April was drier than July or August normally are!  Now May has been parched too, with only 0.07″ at the airport thus far.  Yesterday while playing basketball and Frisbee at Grant Park, I noticed how dry and hard the grassy ground had become.  Today I took a day trip into the Willamette Valley, to investigate conditions outside the city.  Grass alongside freeway exits now looks as dry as midsummer.  While in Champoeg State Park, I noticed a bunch of dry mud in the low, flat areas. The same spots that normally are mushy all spring long, were in full August mode!

Needless to say this drought is turning into a very real problem for the state of Oregon, in a way that it wasn’t just a few weeks ago.  Check out the most recent Drought Monitor maps for Oregon and Washington:

Oregon is actually on the northwestern edge of a HUGE area of advanced drought, which covers nearly all of California and the Southwest:

This is actually the third year in a row where NW Oregon has seen an unusually long stretch of dry weather in the spring. In 2019 it lasted for about 3 weeks, but the rest of the season was wet enough to avoid serious problems. Last year we actually had pretty bad spring drought, and I remember blogging about it a lot.  But it wasn’t as bad as this year.  Here was a map from mid-May 2020 for Oregon:

The Willamette Valley did make it into the Severe category like this year…but the coast wasn’t as bad.  Also the Extreme/Exceptional areas were much less widespread. Luckily we had a very wet June last year, which helped take a little edge off the drought.

The deepening drought is already creating a crisis at the southern border of our state:  farmers in the Klamath Basin are being denied nearly all access to irrigation water, in a desperate effort to prevent still more fish from dying.  But this move is bound to have disastrous economic consequences for the region.

So….are there showers of hope in the forecast for next week?

The good news is YES.  An upper-level trough will begin edging close to our region on Tuesday morning:

By Thursday the trough has deepened into Oregon and northern California:

This will make for at least four days next week (Tue-Fri) where Portland and NW Oregon have a good chance of seeing rain showers. The best opportunity appears to be Wednesday and Thursday. But how much rain?  The UW WRF-GFS map through next Saturday morning shows nearly an inch for Portland:

Unfortunately, the regular GFS and the ECMWF are not quite as bullish on the rain totals. Mark Ingalls showed me some ensemble charts that showed anywhere from 0.1″ to 0.6″ next week.  Possibly more rain the FOLLOWING week if the long-range GFS is to be believed.  I’m not authorized to post the charts here, though. The basic message is:  Some sort of rain next week, but we don’t have a good idea how much.

And we couldn’t be more desperate for the rain now. We only have one month left before our “normal” summer dry season begins.  Once we get past mid-June, there’s little we can do to make up for lost rain.  But even if the pattern turns wet for the next month, it’s too late to bring things back to anything like normal.   Rather, the rain will make our summer conditions merely “bad” as opposed to catastrophic. 

Here’s to the return of liquid sunshine!

Karl