While the last few weeks have had Oregonians breaking out the umbrellas and bemoaning ponds in their streets, the state climatologist says there’s a bright spot to the continuous rains.
Larry O’Neill is an associate professor of Oregon State University’s College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences. He told KLCC that this is the wettest winter in 15 years, which is helping relieve drought across the state. Yet he added, parts of central Oregon will remain in moderate drought.
“That encapsulates Jefferson, Deschutes, and Crook County. That was kind of the epicenter of our recent drought cycle, especially during 2020 through 2022 where we had one of the worst droughts in the state’s recorded history,” said O’Neill. “Even with the normal amount of rain during the winter, it doesn’t recover those soil moisture deficits that we accrue through several years of prolonged drought.”
Last year at this time, Oregon's snowpack was historically low, but a series of storms in January and February quickly brought it close to average across much of the state, O’Neill explained.
“This highlights how the summer drought outlook can shift rapidly if a prolonged dry spell occurs. However, at present, no such dry spell is forecast.”
O’Neill said that while the current outlook is encouraging, full drought recovery still depends on near-normal precipitation through May, and much more mountain snow.
“While water storage at Wickiup Reservoir is still slightly below average for this time of year, even average precipitation through April should nearly fill it this year,” continued O’Neill. “Wallowa County in northeast Oregon has also been in and out of moderate drought this year, but it has received near-normal precipitation since October and is on track to mostly recover from drought."
Soggy spells and dry spells
O’Neill said 1996 was one of the historically wettest winters on record for Oregon, and while last year’s summer wasn’t the hottest of heat waves, the July hot spell led to what he calls a “mass evaporation event.”
“It lasted long enough that it's basically sucked all the moisture out of the soils and the vegetation and a lot of the fuels, and that really contributed to a really bad fire season that we had in especially in eastern Oregon, where a lot of the sagebrush and grasslands cured way too early, were dried out way too early, and that really contributed to the massive acreage burn that we had last summer,” said O'Neill.
The most recent map presented by the U.S. Drought Monitor shows Oregon largely with no drought areas save for a central section that’s experiencing “abnormally dry” to “moderate drought.” A section of northeast Oregon is also experiencing "moderate drought," and a slice of far eastern Oregon is in the "abnormally dry" range. The Jan. 1 release says for the Western region, precipitation amounts of 1 inch or greater fell across much of the Pacific Northwest and Northern California, with some areas receiving up to eight inches above normal for the week.
“Moderate to severe drought were improved in western Montana and eastern Idaho, while moderate drought was removed in southeast Oregon and trimmed in the northeastern part of the state,” the description continues. “Abnormal dryness was improved in northeast Oregon and in small parts of eastern Washington and southern Idaho.”
One potential hazard ahead
One thing that concerns O’Neill is that while there’s been a “great snowpack” recently, the winter has been warmer than usual.
“So we are starting to get to that point where we will be vulnerable to a big, warm atmospheric river event causing flooding concerns,” he said.
O’Neill added that especially in western Oregon, the soil moisture is already saturated.
“The rivers are running pretty high," he said. "We're starting to see landslides and things like that, and something to look out for in the next month or couple months is the possibility of something like a really impactful warm atmospheric river event where we get a lot of rain on snow, melts a lot of snow, and kind of overwhelms our flood-control structures throughout Oregon.”
Drought patterns are of high concern across Oregon, as the impacts of prolonged drought can affect water accessibility and quality, farming and livestock, and forests. The intensity and expanse of the past few wildfire seasons have been attributed to hot weather and dry conditions, leading to “tinderbox” conditions.
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