Summer Forecast Murkier For Central Minnesota Compared To Most Of The Country

(KNSI) – A soggy St. Cloud spring ended Saturday.

The season will wrap up without making the top 10 all-time but it is in the wettest 20% since records began. Meteorologist Tyler Hasenstein says 2024’s roughly 10.5 inches of precipitation really stands out compared to the drought of the last couple of years.

“Compared to last year, that’s about two or three inches higher and compared to 2021, another two or three inches higher. If we compare it to our last kind of — what we would consider a wet overall year, which was 2019, only about half an inch below where we were at that point in 2019 as well.”

When meteorological summer begins Saturday, Hasenstein says there is no consensus among forecasters about how much precipitation we’ll see. He expects a La Niña pattern to form late summer, and the transition reduces forecast certainty.

Central and western Minnesota are among the few parts of the country where officials are not ready to predict a warmer-than-normal summer. Hasenstein explains to KNSI News why.

“When we talk about kind of your really prolonged heat waves during the summer, oftentimes we talked about ridging. That’s a big kind of buzzword in the weather community. With this type of setup that we have, you’re more likely to get ridging that stalls over the especially the western United States, but also the east. And it doesn’t like to sit in the middle of the country.”

Hasenstein says if he had to lean in a direction he would guess we’ll be slightly warmer than average in the St. Cloud area. That would still be significantly cooler than the record heat that battered the area in 2023.

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