High Pressure Ridge

Amaury · Dec 29, 2013

We're supposed to start seeing some snow down here sometime in January, but there's an article on our lack of snow that I don't really understand. What's a high pressure ridge? I know a ridge is a hill, but I definitely know it's not the case here.

December 28, 2013:

Persistent high-pressure ridges over the Pacific Ocean are pushing snow-creating wet weather away from Washington and Oregon, according to the National Weather Service.

This condition occurred off and on this fall through November but has been the dominant block to snowfall in December, meteorologists said Friday from NWS offices in Pendleton, Ore.

The result is the smallest and slowest-forming snowpack in at least 20 years for this time of year in the Cascades and communities on its eastern slopes in both states.

Snowpack is 44 percent of normal in the mountains ringing the Upper Yakima River Basin in Kittitas County, according to the U.S. Natural Resource Conservation Service.

In the Lower Yakima Basin, the snowpack is a bit higher but still low at 60 percent of normal.

That’s way off what it has been. Last year about this time the snowpack in the upper basin of Kittitas County was 21 percent above normal, or 121 percent. The lower basin, in Yakima County, was 118 percent.

In late 2011-early 2012 the upper basin was a healthy 87 percent of normal snowpack and building. Early 2011 it was near 100 percent of normal.

Pushing northward

The high-pressure ridge pushes the wet weather that’s heading west from the Pacific way to the north, across Canada, and it later drops into the U.S. Midwest.

Forecasters say the federal government’s climate prediction center indicates the likelihood that the cold but dry pattern will continue in the Pacific Northwest until at least mid-January or a little beyond that.

In some Pacific Northwest basins, the snowpack is running only 30 to 40 percent at this time.
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High Pressure Ridge

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