The heat caught many people off guard-even Adelle Monteblanco, a public-health professor and extreme-heat researcher at Pacific University. The mid-May heat wave resulted in at least 160 heat-related emergency-room visits in Oregon and Washington over four days, a rate more than 30 times higher than normal. Health risks rise only when the temperature is higher than the local “normal.” This means that in the Northwest, in May, heat in the low 90s can be dangerous, even if it wouldn’t be in August. In a normal seasonal cycle, by the time temperatures peak in the summer, people’s bodies-and behavior-have had months to acclimate. Our bodies also aren’t ready for such early heat. Read: Nowhere should expect a cool summer “That hinges on summer temperatures,” McEvoy says, but all signs point to a hot, dry summer too. Much of western Washington and northwestern Oregon is expected to follow later this year. The National Weather Service reported that the area considered to be in drought grew in May. That has big implications for the whole region, says Dan McEvoy, a climatologist at the Western Regional Climate Center whose research includes spring heat waves: “One place that will show up is in earlier fire danger.” By mid-June, hundreds of acres had burned in Oregon and Washington. ![]() Starting in early May, snow melted at record rates. Then it “did a disappearing act,” Bond’s office reported on June 8. In April, the Northwest’s snowpack looked about average. Here’s what we learned from this year’s skipped spring:įire and drought risk grew. “We got a little bit more complete and nuanced view of how all this works,” Bond says. Spring temperatures in the Northwest haven’t been warming as quickly as those in other seasons, but according to Bond, they’re catching up.Īfter the strange start to 2023, he says, the community, including climate scientists, “now appreciates, a little bit more than before, that spring matters.” Without it, water supplies, ecosystems, agriculture, and more get out of whack. “It was a little bit of a whipsaw around here.” Such instability-particularly during the shoulder seasons-is expected to rise because of climate change. Spring is notoriously fickle, but this year, the season’s transition “happened faster than it almost always does,” says Nick Bond, Washington’s state climatologist. May, to Northwesterners, bore all the hallmarks of summer. Smoke drifted down from Canadian wildfires. Later in the month, Washington and eastern Oregon toppled even more records. ![]() Coastal communities set records in the 90s too. During a heat wave that started around May 12, Portland’s metro area beat records for consecutive May days over 80 degrees (nine) and 90 degrees (four). Just two weeks later, though, Spokane hit a daily record of 84 degrees Fahrenheit a month of historic heat ensued. Īround the middle of April, spring in the still chilly and wet Pacific Northwest seemed a long way off. ![]() This article was originally published by High Country News.
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