Oregon’s Cascades got a couple inches of snow over the weekend and now there’s frost expected tonight (Monday) in the lower elevations.
John Bumgardner, meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Portland said there’s a frost advisory for the Willamette Valley and the coast.
“We are thinking that without clouds we are going to radiationally cool and many locations in the low elevations will see frost for the first time this year,” Bumgardner said. “Higher elevations have already seen it and they’ve even seen snow.”
Bumgardner said a harder freeze is possible in some low valleys—which could effectively end the season for agriculture.
There’s also a possibility of more rain and snow for Oregon this coming weekend.
Oregon could get more precipitation than average this year due to La Nina conditions, but that might not translate to more snowpack. Bumgardner said if it gets cold enough, we’ll get snow, but it’s still hard to predict, given climate change.
“A lot of our precipitation, as you know, falls in the winter,” Bumgardner said. “But, I think this is one of the problems with the climate change issue is it’s leading us to have slightly warmer than average winters so we get less snowpack.”
La Nina is when sea surface temperatures are cooler than average at the equator. For the Pacific Northwest, that can mean more precipitation in the winter.
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