Despite last weekend’s long-awaited sunshine, an unusual weather pattern and the lingering effects of La Niña have continued to grip Whatcom County with cool, rainy days all spring.
With daily temperatures running 3.4 degrees below average according to data from the National Weather Service (NWS), this month registered as one of the coldest Mays in recorded history.
“The first half of May was the third-coolest on record since 1949,” local weather expert Randy Small said. “And the precipitation, I don’t want to call it a fire hose, because it was a fire hose in November when we got all the flooding, but we’re just seeing more than normal.”
Just last week, a late-season winter storm hit the region, bringing winds gusting to 50 mph and close to a foot of snow at high elevations. More than 2,500 county residents were without power following the storm May 18, according to an advisory report from the Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office.
Samantha Borth, a meteorologist at the NWS office in Seattle, called the storm “unusual.”
“We did see some snow on the mountains and anything higher-elevated,” Borth said. “What we saw over the past week would potentially be a little bit more unusual.”
Borth said the storm could be related to the effects of La Niña, unusually cool ocean temperatures in the equatorial Pacific that typically bring colder, wetter weather to the Pacific Northwest.
“La Nina has a well-earned reputation for gloomy, chilly springs,” said Justin Shaw, founder of the Seattle Weather Blog, a website that tracks weather and climate across the Pacific Northwest. “It’s a little soul-sucking.”
Borth said regional residents should expect to see things warm up slightly in June and July as the effects of La Niña fade, though Small is less certain.
“We are in the second year of a La Niña phase, meaning things are generally weighted towards cooler and wetter than normal,” Small said. “La Niña most often affects our weather in the fall and winter seasons, but it can back-end the winter season and lead to cool springs and even cool summers.”
Local farmers are struggling with the wet conditions.
“[The weather] will make everything later,” said Jonathan Maberry, a local berry farmer at Maberry Farms. “We’re expecting raspberry season to be about two weeks behind, the strawberries maybe a week to 10 days behind and the blueberries about a week behind.”
The significant rainfall meant fields and pastures, typically plowed and planted in April and May, were too muddy for farmers to work.
“Farmers can’t get into their fields, so fields are not able to be plowed, which hinders planting,” Small said. “It’s putting all the farmers weeks behind.”
Maberry was able to get his raspberry plants in the ground early this year before May’s record-breaking precipitation made it too difficult.
“There are a lot of other farms in the area that were delayed pretty significantly,” he said. “The potato or corn [farmers] are the ones that are hurting probably the most. With all this cold and wet, they’re way behind on getting their potatoes and corn in the ground.”
Maberry has other concerns for his plants, though.
“The thing we worry about with a cold, wet spring is an increase in soil disease,” he said. “We could start seeing some of the impacts of that when it starts to warm up. If the plants are infected with phytophthora, they’ll collapse once the heat begins.”
Phytophthora, a type of water mold, can spread rapidly through berry plants during rainy years, causing the roots to die and the fruit to rot.
Borth hopes Washingtonians may start to see warmer weather soon.
“We should be transitioning out of [La Niña] potentially in the summertime,” she said. “As we get into June and July, we’ll definitely transition out.”
