Quarterly Climate Impacts and Outlook for the Western Region for March–May 2023. Dated June 2023.

Temperatures were generally cool to cold west-wide, with notable cold anomalies along the California coast and in the interior Intermountain West. With few exceptions, spring was wetter than normal in the western U.S., largely owing to a wet March.

Under Congressional direction, NOAA’s National Integrated Drought Information System (NIDIS) is leading an interagency team on the Upper Missouri River Basin (UMRB) Soil Moisture and Snowpack Data Value Study.

Quarterly Climate Impacts and Outlook for the Western Region for December 2022–February 2023. Dated March 2023.

Temperatures were below normal across nearly the entire West with the exception of parts of southeast New Mexico. A series of atmospheric rivers from late December through mid-January brought heavy precipitation to California, the Great Basin, and parts of the northern Rockies where total winter precipitation was record high in some instances.