By Dian Ver Valen
| The Times
Scientists Forecast Warmer, Drier Winter
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November 20, 2014
Cecilia Acevedo, 9, pulls a sled carrying Zoey Smith, 7, and Caleb Solis, 3, in her front yard in Dayton on Thursday afternoon. The young Dayton residents were hoping for enough snow to play, but the weather didn't accommodate. The forecast for this winter doesn't call for much more snow, either.
DAYTON - The Touchet Valley was touched by early snows this past week and temperatures plummeted into the teens over the weekend, but the long-range forecast for our area doesn't look much like the weather we've had since Thursday.
In fact, temperatures are predicted to warm into the 40s later this week. Before Wednesday's cold spell settled in, the weather station at the Dayton Middle School registered temperatures in the 60s and very low 70s in the first week of November.
"This pattern looks like it will be around for the next 10 days, but we don't expect any more snow in your area," Dennis Hull, a meteorologist out of NOAA's National Weather Service in Pendleton, said on Friday. The long-term outlook, issued last month, for November through January called for temperatures to be near-to or above average with precipitation at or below normal, Hull said.
This cold spell doesn't bother farmers, said Byron Behne, marketing manager for Northwest Grain Growers in Walla Walla County, but the poor outlook for rain certainly has them worried.
"There's really no potential for damage," Behne said of the quick plunge into freezing temperatures last week. "It would have to be around zero with 10- 20 mile-an-hour winds and no snow cover for any winter damage to the wheat planted this fall."
What Behne says is the biggest problem facing wheat farmers is how dry it's been in the last year. "We had a couple of days with rain in the last week or two, and that's helped, but it's not really a draught buster," he said. "That's our major obstacle at this point."
Staff at the Columbia County Conservation District collect annual rainfall data from nearly two dozen locations around the valley, and the numbers show that Behne's fears may be justified.
Rainfall between September 2013 and August 2014 is two, sometimes three inches below the average. Between August 2012 and August 2013, some rain collection stations show a drop of five to nine inches in annual rainfall.
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