More snow this past week means the Red River Valley is in for a real flood season, but the National Weather Service said Wednesday that it won't be any worse than 2010 or 2011 for most areas.
Even the Devils Lake Basin, which got significantly more snow than the valley will likely not see a return to record levels this year, said Greg Gust, a meteorologist with the weather service office in Grand Forks.
"It won't be anything we haven't had before," he said.
Gust said he expects this sort of news will come as a shock to many in the valley, which didn't have much of a flood season last spring and was dry enough earlier this past winter that many expected the same this spring.
The weather service is scheduled to brief flood fighters and the news media today about its flood forecast, at which time Gust said he would offer more details.
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Like today's forecast, the last forecast two weeks ago came a few days after a major winter storm that brought a fresh layer of snow.
At that time, the weather service said the greatest risk of flooding was in the southern Red River Valley, with Fargo facing an 88 percent chance of major flooding, meaning the river is at 30 feet or deeper. The agency also said the city faced a 5 percent chance of the river exceeding 38.2 feet. The city's permanent flood protection system is good to at least 38 feet, after which sandbagging in many areas is needed.
In the same forecast, the weather service said Grand Forks faced an 11 percent chance of major flooding.
Devils Lake had a 10 percent chance of returning to the record level it reached in 2011. Since then, the basin has received 1 foot to 1.5 feet of snow.
Gust said slow melting and record to near-record cold temperatures are bumping up the likelihood of a major flood.
Temperatures will stay in the freezing range until the middle of next week, he said. The snow and ice won't really start melting until the first week in April, he said, and a flood won't start "materializing" until the second week.
The snowpack upstream of Fargo, in the Wahpeton, N.D., area, is "as much or more" than it was in 2011, he said. "It's going to take days and days to melt that."
On the Web: More information about flooding in the Red River Valley is available at www.rrbdin.org and www.crh.noaa.gov/fgf .
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Call Tran at (701) 780-1248; (800) 477-6572, ext. 1248; or send email to ttran@gfherald.com . Forum News Service contributed to this report.
