Summer arrives with a soggy, soggy start
<p>Four-year-old Candice Ngan, left, and her 6-year-old brother Cyrus, from Portland, Ore., were among the first visitors to Logan Pass in Glacier National Park on Tuesday. The long-awaited opening of Going-to-the-Sun Road over the pass occurred around noon.</p>
Rain-weary Flathead Valley residents may not want it, but just one more inch of precipitation over the next 11 days will make it the rainiest June on record.
“It looks like we’re approaching a record,” said Ray Nickless, a hydrologist with the National Weather Service in Missoula. So far this month, 4.69 inches of rain has been measured at Glacier Park International Airport.
The record for the month is 5.66 inches set in 2005. That’s followed by 5.3 inches in 1995 and 4.72 inches in 1966.
The valley had been lagging behind average precipitation for the first five months of the year, Nickless said, “but now you’ve made it up in the month of June.”
The valley received .9 inches of rain over a 48-hour period by Tuesday afternoon, and West Glacier got 1.5 inches over the same period.
The recent heavy precipitation has driven up the Flathead River at Columbia Falls by about 3 feet since Sunday, pushing it to a minor flood stage measurement of 14 feet on Tuesday.
However, Nickless said the potential for flooding driven by snowpack runoff has dropped substantially because snow has melted at lower and middle elevations.
There still is plenty of snow, however, at high elevations.
An automated snow gauge on Flattop Mountain in Glacier National Park is measuring 80 inches of snow containing 40 inches of water. The Noisy Basin gauge on the Swan Crest is measuring 54 inches of snow with 25 inches of water.
“It’s good news for river recreation as well as fisheries, but as far as flooding, it won’t mean much,” Nickless said.
Today is the first day of summer, with the solstice arriving just after 5 p.m., and there is some warmer weather in the forecast.
Temperatures today are expected to be in the 60s with some sunshine.
On Thursday and Friday, high temperatures will reach the mid-70s, with more sunshine and an increasing chance of thunderstorms. Temperatures will remain in the 70s over the weekend, with more thunderstorms in the forecast.