EL NINO IS BACK
Monday, October 19th, 2009 -- 12:13 PM
Government forecasters say we should expect a warmer than normal winter this year, but caution there could be some very cold stretches, too.He says the winter weather patters should be dominated by El Nino again this year.
"It's forecast to be a moderate strength El Nino," explains Glenn Lussky at the National Weather Service in La Crosse. "It's a warming of the equatorial Pacific sea surface temperatures."
Basically, that warm water in the Pacific can alter the jetstream, preventing arctic cold fronts from diving into the Midwest. To make a long story short, El Nino winters are typically warmer than average for us, but the affect on precipitation is random.
Lussky says there may be some other elements at play this year. For instance, global temperatures are actually cooling the past few years.
"We have to go back to the 60s, basically, to see what the El Nino did then under these types of situations. Each of those winters was above normal, but not a lot above normal. There was always one month that was very cold during those winters," he says.
"There could be some periods of cold weather this winter," Lussky predicts.
Now, forecasting the weather is a science, but it?s not perfected. There are so many variables, but Lussky says the winter outlook does contain their best predictions based on known factors. We?ll be posting a link to the winter weather outlook on the news page of our website.
On the Web:
[url=http://beta.w1.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2009/20091015_winteroutlook.html]2009 Winter Outlook[/url]
Feel free to contact us with questions and/or comments.