Over the past week, the Palouse area has been receiving an unusual amount of snowfall, with April 10 seeing 3 inches of snow in Moscow. Meteorologist Steven Van Horn from the National Weather Service in Spokane discussed the odd snowfall.
“It’s anomalously cold for this time of the year, where cold air came down out of Canada,” he said. “We have broken or have tied some cold maximum temperatures across the region and so that’s fairly unusual.”
Van Horn said it is very late to see the conditions which a cold airmass needs for it to be able to produce snow.
According to Van Horn, there will be snowfall going into tonight and it will begin to thin out in the morning.
“We have another system that will be coming in for Saturday and will bring more snow,” Van Horn said. “It will also start to bring some kind of warmer air into the region as well, but for Pullman and Moscow, I think there’s still levels could remain low enough that they’ll see mostly snow.”
Van Horn said that there is a chance of snow sticking to roads in the evening.
Currently, there is a weather advisory for the surrounding towns of Potlatch, Rosalia, Plummer, Colfax, Tekoa, Uniontown, Pullman and Oakesdale in addition to Moscow.
“The tricky part with the forecast is there could be some spots that may get some isolated spots that could maybe get more in the four to six (inches) range,” Van Horn said. “That’s just because of how cold and unstable the atmosphere is.”
Daniel V. Ramirez can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter @DVR_Tweets