Twin Cities Under ‘Major’ Spring Flood Risk: NOAA Outlook

MINNEAPOLIS — The Twin Cities metro area is under a "major" risk for flooding this spring, according to the 2023 spring weather outlook released Thursday by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

About 44 percent of the continental U.S., roughly the eastern half, is at risk of flooding this spring, according to Ed Clark, director of NOAA’s National Water Center.

But the risk is greatest in the Mississippi River basin, from Minneapolis to St. Louis, thanks to the melting snow.

The metro's current snowpack is similar to the pack in early 2019, which was the last time the region suffered from severe floods. That spring, the Mississippi River in St. Paul saw its seventh-largest flood crest on record, according to the National Weather Service.

The good news overall in the forecast for April through June is that the worst of the drought in the Midwest and western states may be over. For the first time since 2020, exceptional and extreme drought have been wiped out in parched California, and as snowpack melts, combined with recent storms, conditions could improve even more.

However, extreme or exceptional drought conditions are expected to persist through spring across parts of the High Plains, according to the forecast. Drought conditions are also expected to persist in parts of the Northwest and the Northern Rockies, and could develop in Washington and far south in New Mexico.

The spring outlook is influenced by the end of a triple-dip La Nina, a climate pattern that worsens drought conditions and increases hurricane activity.

The El Nino-Southern Oscillatiois climate pattern is based on changes in rainfall and sea surface temperatures across the equatorial Pacific Ocean and influences temperature and precipitation around the world. La Nina occurs when ocean temperatures are cooler than normal and rainfall is reduced in the eastern to central Pacific Ocean.

“La Nina has finally ended after being in place nearly continuously for more than two years,” Jon Gottschalck, chief of the operational prediction branch at NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Weather Service, said in a news release.

He said the ESNO-neutral pattern — the transition between El Nino and La Nina — is likely to continue into the early summer, with elevated chances of El Nino developing thereafter.