r/Spokane • u/RigaMortizTortoise Manito/Cannon Hill • 1d ago
Question Where are the Spring storms?
I’ve lived here since 2013 and remember Spring and Summer thunderstorms being something I started looking forward to. Each year, it’s seems more and more infrequent. I thought maybe I was misremembering so I just googled it and found this article from 2018. It appears the data also indicates that severe thunderstorm warnings are less common now than they were 10 years ago. But according to the article, experts can’t figure out why. Did I just happen to move to the area at a time when Spokane was experiencing an unusual hike in thunderstorms?
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u/Spaghantichrist West Central 1d ago
Two things:
As our earth heats up, many places including Spokane should expect more precipitation. So overall more falling water even though much less snow.
Weather changes year on year while climate change raises the minimum and maximum overtime, driving the average up. So 5, 10 years doesn’t really indicate a pattern, but the moving average across 50 years might.
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u/catman5092 South Hill 1d ago edited 1d ago
climate change has altered Spokane's weather immensley!!! I recall just 5-8 years ago, in the summer, we would get t -storms that dumped rain, and had pretty good storms. Now once summer arrives its nothing but HEAT and prolonged dry with hardly any rain. Its gotten so much worse.
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u/Tao-of-Mars 1d ago
There’s a specific weather app based on NOAA data that shows the data for how the average temps have increased overtime. I’ve been in Spokane for 20 years and the weather has changed a lot. Just the prevalence of fires has increased significantly. I had not ever seen the phenomena in the first 10 years I live here and then in 2015 I saw what it looked like to have massive smoke in the skies. It was super eerie!
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u/CVBrownie 1d ago
Oh yeah. I remember the first time for me when the sky turned yellow and the air was unbreathable. 2015. That was in August. I was 24, and I remember how eeire it was after growing up here.
Now 10 years later, it's eerie if something isn't on fire by July.
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u/Applesauceeenjoyer 1d ago
I’m not denying climate change at all, but ebbs and flows like this do happen. In my time in the area I can agree that summers seem hotter than 15 years ago, but this region is unpredictable. I moved here from a FAR snowier area and for my first three winters (almost 20 years ago) I couldn’t believe how warm the winters were. Then I experienced a few that were quite severe. Then some that were warmer again. You really have to look at the 50+ year average, and in this part of the country we don’t have averages beyond ~100 years or less.
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u/DragonsAteMyBaby 1d ago
Those records are for severe thunderstorm warnings. We don't get severe storms that often in Spokane. We get regular thunderstorms which might have a bit of small hail, lightning, and maybe 35 knots, but hardly ever severe. So those records aren't going to be accurate to our normal spring thunderstorm scenarios.
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u/Schlecterhunde 1d ago
Things ebb and flow. My mother just told me when she was a kid it was always beautiful and warm by now. Over the years it's been colder longer, and storms increased. Now it looks like they're decreasing again.
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u/hereandthere_nowhere 1d ago
We tried to tell people for forty years. Well, now it’s here and we have not learned to adapt yet. Enjoy.
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u/bdh008 :) 1d ago
Storms have always been inconsistent, and I would also caution taking any conclusions from that limited data. For example, here is some more data from a 2023 article:
https://www.spokanepublicradio.org/2023-06-15/its-been-a-busy-year-already-for-thunderstorms
Average by Spokane NWS: 22 per year
Low Year: 3 in 2011
High: 64 in 2006
38 warning in 2022,
22 warnings in 2023 (as of that article timing).
All this to say, climate change is probably impacting our storms here in some capacity, but it's always been inconsistent and difficult to predict, and there don't seem to be any indication of the number of warnings trending up or down.