El Nino pattern impacting spring weather systems

On a day when weather caused an early start at the Masters, storm systems are surrounding southeastern Idaho.

The weather in the region has been unpredictable lately with warm, sunny days followed by cold, precipitation filled ones. It’s a trend that doesn’t seem likely to end anytime soon.

“Tonight and tomorrow, we’re gonna see another round of precipitation, mountain snow, valley rain,” Tim Axford of the National Weather Service explained.

“Tuesday we’ve got another system coming in, so it doesn’t really stop until midweek, we get a little break in there and then looking at the end of the week, towards the weekend, another round of systems coming.”

Axford said that while a lot of the weather trends are the norm for spring, the El Nino pattern is impacting some systems.

“That kind of opens the door to the Pacific and having these systems come in every couple days or so,” he said. “So we get kind of that tease of nice weather and then all of a sudden we get the next system slamming into us.”

According to Axford, El Nino changes the patterns, but not in any major way.

“We can’t blame El Nino for any one of these systems, but we can kind of put the overall pattern on the El Nino pattern,” Axford said.

Although it might not seem like it, El Nino systems don’t last forever. According to Axford, they generally have their biggest impacts during the winters and wrap up in the spring and summer.

“Once we get into May, June, July, we won’t be talking as much about El Nino. We’ll be talking more about individual systems that could be giving us more precipitation and more rain, more thunderstorms even.”

Slowly but surely, temperatures are beginning to rise and sooner than later the region will break the pattern and see normal forecasts again.

In fact, temperatures are expected to reach the 60’s again this week.