05:47 PM PDT on Monday, June 6, 2005

By ANTONIA GIEDWOYN, kgw.com Staff

It may be June, but you wouldn’t know it based on the weather.

By kgw.com viewer/Keith Biggs

This photo was taken during heavy flash flooding in Troutdale, Ore. last week.

Mother Nature seems to have fallen a few months behind, producing April conditions and sprinkling the Pacific Northwest with showers of the wet and white variety during a month that usually brings sunny 70-degree temperatures.

“This is a weather pattern that defies logic,” said KGW meteorologist Dave Salesky.

A series of low-pressure, winter-like systems that developed in the Gulf of Alaska have dropped into Oregon and Washington even though, typically, such storms stay to the north of this area at this time of year, Salesky said.

“If this had occurred in January, we’d be buried [in snow]. We’d be digging out,” he said.

Monday morning it was snowing on Oregon mountain passes. The snow level in the Cascades is at 4,000 feet, which isn’t unprecedented, Salesky said, but it’s lower than usual for June. If conditions are right, Timberline ski area on Mt. Hood could receive up to three inches of snow overnight and possibly an inch or two on Tuesday.

KGW

Snow was falling at ski resorts on Mt. Hood on Monday.

The low-pressure systems are not just affecting Oregon and Washington. Unseasonably cool and wet weather extends from Montana to northern California, according to meteorologists.

Seventy degrees is the average temperature for the greater Portland area in the beginning of June.

Monday’s high temperature was not expected to exceed 61 in Portland and Vancouver. Much of the rest of the week will remain overcast with a chance of rain and temperatures in the low 60s. Later in the week, the weather could warm to the low 70s, according to forecast projections.

The current weather pattern is very similar to what happened in 1982, Salesky said. Spring and summer that year were extremely cool and wet.