National Weather Service Climate Hydrologist Craig Schmidt shared on Thursday that with all of the snow still on the ground, the severity of the upcoming flooding season depends on the state’s weather throughout the coming weeks.
“We’re going to see some kind of flooding pretty much throughout the whole area,” Schmidt said. “It just really depends on how severe that would be, and that will depend on the weather conditions we get in April.”
Schmidt says that at the moment, the driving factor behind potential flooding is the significant amounts of snow still on the ground, which he says has to go somewhere once it melts.
According to National Weather Service data, snowpack depth hasn’t changed much in the last two weeks, and it continues to get deeper in northern Minnesota.
If the temperatures stay where they are, and we don’t get much more precipitation, the spring flooding outlook still shows chances of flooding across the region. Now Schmidt says that any upcoming precipitation the state gets will only affect the severity of that flooding.
Forecasters say the next chance of any meaningful precipitation will come at the beginning of next month.
“We are keeping an eye out on the forecast. The models are hinting at something around the first of April in terms of precipitation,” Schmidt said. “We don’t know if it’s a warm one yet, but we’re keeping an eye on that. So that’s probably the next thing for people to watch out for.”
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