Forecast

Let’s get straight to the forecast first, and I’m happy to say that we are not done with the rain for summer yet. Details below!

Forecast details

1.) Sunday (Father’s Day) looks great in my opinion. A nice cool morning with a few clouds likely. Nearly wall to wall sunshine for the afternoon though. High of 85°.

2.) Monday – Wednesday are going to feel rather hot with widespread highs in the 90s. Thursday will be much cooler.

3.) Thursday night into Friday morning is when I expect rain to arrive. This should be a nice steady rain hitting the entire Willamette Valley and most of western Oregon for that matter. Rain changes to scattered showers in the afternoon.

4.) Saturday looks like a shower and sunbreak type of day with thundershowers possible.

5.) Probably a little too soon to be talking about next Sunday, but it’s possible that the showers persist into next Sunday as well. More details later this week.

I also expect to have additional details on rainfall amounts, timing etc. in a future post this coming week. For now, plan on a wetter Friday and Saturday, and at a minimum, cooler weather next Sunday.

Drought and wildfires

I see a lot of wild posts online, and trying to sort through truth versus fiction or speculation can be tough, but I suppose that’s why I’m here haha. In this section, I’ll discuss our current drought situation, and then why I’m not panicking about our wildfire season yet.

Drought update

It’s true that most of Oregon has been much drier than normal for several months now. Salem is currently running at about 50% of our typical June rainfall for this point in the month. We picked up only 29% of our average monthly precip for May, 99% of average in April, and 71% in March. We have to go back to February to find a wetter than average month around here.

The drought monitor map reveals that it’s more of an issue the farther south and east one goes in Oregon. For instance. Just 50 some miles to our south, Eugene only had 13% of their typical May rainfall (versus 29% in Salem), and that’s been the trend for much of this spring. On the flipside, places to our northwest like Astoria and Clatsop County are actually doing alright.

We came into spring with almost no snow in our mountains below 4500 feet across the state – a near historic low. The lack of snow exposed vegetation and underbrush in our forests earlier than we would typically see and vegetation is drying out. The virtually nonexistent snowpack is the other major reason why large sections of central and eastern Oregon are facing such serious drought conditions.

Fortunately there’s some hope. A few days of wetting rain next weekend won’t end the drought, but it can’t hurt. More importantly, the rain next weekend could really put our fire season on hold west of the Cascades, and that brings me to my final point.

No need to panic about wildfires yet

I want to remind you that fire season around here has much more to do with what occurs during June through September rather than the months prior, but in our world of clickbait, likes, subscribes, and follows, dramatic headlines often take center stage. Click on the images below to get a closer look.

And honestly, these are just a small sample of the posts I’ve seen. I’m not forecasting how bad the fire season is, but I want to set a few things straight. If you were to ask random people off the street, I’m certain most of them would believe that every wildfire season over the past decade has been worse than normal, but that’s actually not true. I think a lot of it has to do with perception and headlines like you see above. When’s the last time you read a headline telling you that we had fewer acres burned than normal? Those headlines are out there, but they simply don’t make the rounds like scary predictions do.

For example, do you recall seeing this image circulated a few years ago (2023)? Probably not…. Such reality checks are hard to come by in our media these days. There’s rarely any follow up on what actually took place. Only dire warnings of the future. These numbers below were provided by the Oregon Department of Forestry and the Northwest Interagency Coordination Center.

If you think about it, every single summer here are is generally warm and very dry regardless of how much rain fell during the previous winter. Yes, the lack of snow in the mountains this year made things worse earlier than normal, but how bad fire season gets really depends on the conditions we see in summer. Well timed summer rains can go a long ways in preventing large fires. Consequently, poorly timed dry thunderstorms with lightning strikes and gusty dry winds can make the season terrible (think 2020).

Lastly, and very sadly, people have been an increasingly higher cause of fires than in the past which can really alter what could have been a quiet fire season. If you want to read more, here is an article from the end of last summer: 2025 fire season – less acreage, but more human causes

Hopefully we will never tire from seeking the truth. Okay, have a fantastic Father’s Day celebrating the fathers or fatherlike figures in our lives, and stay safe out there! 🙂