SPOKANE, Wash. — An incoming storm will bring widespread snow to the mountains of the Northwest this weekend. While low-lying areas like Spokane miss out on a bulk of the moisture, the impacts of the incoming system will bring about a change felt in the week to come. The spring-like warmth is on the way out as winter weather makes its triumphant return.
An incoming cold front will hit the Cascades Saturday morning, then the Northern Rockies later in the day. A vast majority of the moisture stays in the mountains with this disturbance.
Parts of the Cascades will get more than a foot of snow and the Northern Rockies look to pick up almost a half foot in the coming days. The Silver Valley likely sees between 2 and 5 inches of snow by Monday morning. Sandpoint will see 1-2 inches of snow while most other low elevation areas miss out.
Spokane and Coeur d’Alene will miss out on a bulk of the moisture with this cold front. Low-lying areas of Eastern Washington and the Idaho Panhandle will pick up a little light snow and rain over the weekend, but no heavy rain or shovel-inducing snow is expected. The big impact in these areas will be the temperature plummet in the week to come.
The front arrives as the upper-atmospheric ridge dominating the current weather pattern breaks down. That ridge has been responsible for the sunshine and warm temperatures of late. As the ridge flattens out and eventually turns into a trough, arctic air will funnel into much of the western half of the United States.
Below normal temperatures will dominate the forecast from the Pacific to the Great Lakes. In the Inland Northwest that means a sharp snap back to a winter chill. In Spokane, daytime highs will fall to near 30 degrees with overnight lows in the teens. To make matters worse, all that cold comes with some strong wind. Sustained winds will be around 25 miles per hour with gusts near 40 early next week, meaning the windchill will have it feeling like it is close to zero degrees at times.
To put the incoming cold snap in perspective, those temps are colder than even the average coldest days of the year in Spokane climatologically. This winter brought this kind of cold once before but that was all the way back at the beginning of the year.
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