Is Easter in the Tri-Cities usually windy and cool?

This blog post is a response to the following question, which I received over on my Facebook page – Tri-Cities Weather:

Mark, I remember all the Easters here in the Tri Cities as being WINDY and COOL. Never weather good enough to dress up nice for Easter Sunday. Is my memory faulty or is it always windy on Easter? -Bobbie L.

I didn’t have an immediate response to this question. Anecdotally, I remember having my picture taken as a child in Kennewick on sunny and warm days, but I don’t remember enough off the top of my head to be able to comfortably say one way or another. Wind records from official sites like the Tri-Cities Airport certainly exist, but they can be hard to find. For convenience, I decided to look at the AgWeatherNet station at CBC, which is more or less across the street from the airport. From there, I can pull data from as far back as 2007, which should be able to give us an idea of our experiences in Easters past.

From this data set, I figured it was appropriate to look at both Easter Sunday as well as the day before so that we can get a picture of the whole weekend. Opinions on the specific definition of “windy and cool” will vary from person to person, but I draw my line as a combination of wind busts above 20 mph and high temperatures below 75°. To me at least, 75° during calm conditions is pretty nice, but a stiff breeze can make it feel cool to me.

In doing this, I found that windy and cool Easter weekends are not uncommon. Out of the 13 years that I looked at, nine of them had either one or both of the days as what I would consider to be windy and cool. Of course, this isn’t Mother Nature specifically targeting Easter weekend. If you’ve lived in this area for a while, you know that Spring brings with it wind storms and occasional dust storms.

Saturday (April 11) was a prime example of this. Above are the hourly weather reports from the Tri-Cities Airport showing wind gusts peaking at 31 mph several times. More interesting than that, though, is the visibility and haze report. That haze was dust from the Moses Lake area that was carried to the Tri-Cities and Walla Walla bringing visibility down to four miles at times. Our local National Weather Service office had a fun tweet about this:

Of course, Saturday wasn’t our first stiff wind this spring, nor was it the worst. Both March 14 and 30 also brought strong winds to our area. Spring is an active time of year in the Columbia Basin as our hemisphere adjusts to the increased warmth that being tilted toward the sun brings. This active weather doesn’t care what day it is. Windy and cool Easter weekends perfectly demonstrate this, but they aren’t the only days that have it.

Huge thanks to Bobbie for reaching out! If you have weather questions, feel free to head over to Tri-Cities Weather on Facebook to reach out. Have a happy and blessed Easter, everyone!