How much snow will Conn. get this winter? Here’s the early outlook.
It’s early, but as meteorologists look at the clues out in the Pacific Ocean, they can see signs of a more snowy winter this year than we’ve had in the recent past.
El Niño and La Niña are both factors, although they may be weaker this year, giving the jet stream more influence on our weather patterns, forecasters say.
“One of the things that we’ll look at for the winter is going to be actually out in the Pacific,” said Anthony Carpino, meteorologist with NBC Connecticut, WVIT.
El Niño and La Niña “will play a big role in our weather, in the U.S., North America, and then, of course, for us here in New England,” he said.
So what we’ve been doing this year is we’ve been in an El Niño, and now we’re transitioning into a La Niña,” he said. “So essentially, what that means for us is usually slightly cooler conditions and slightly more wet conditions, as far as comparing things to average go.”
That could mean more snow this year, but it’s really hard to tell, Carpino said.
“I was actually looking back at some of our La Niña years, and it really just depends on some of the other things that are going on,” he said. “There’s a lot that you can look at. Some years we’ve had record snowfall in a La Niña season, and other La Niña years we’ve had well below average snowfall. So it really can go back and forth.”
According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s three-month outlook, Connecticut has a 40% to 50% chance of both higher-than-normal temperatures and precipitation from December to February.
“When you look at the year as a whole, it doesn’t really look to me like there’s going to be a giant switch coming anytime soon, and all of a sudden it’s going to be ice cold or something like that,” Carpino said. “Usually there’s pretty good signals on that sort of thing.”
However, he said in 2010-11, also a transition year from El Niño to La Niña, “that is the year, that winter season, that we got 86 inches of snow,” he said. “The average is about 43.”
El Niño and La Niña are two opposing climate patterns in the Pacific that affect the jet stream, according to NOAA. El Niño brings warmer water to the surface of the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. La Niña has the opposite effect. Together they’re known as the El Niño-Southern Oscillation cycle, or ENSO, and occur about every two to seven years.
The two patterns affect whether the jet stream will dip farther south from the Arctic and Canada and also help determine how strong the annual hurricane season will be.
“If we get a nor’easter and it hits at the sweet spot there, and our temperatures are just slightly cooler, then we get a lot of snow,” Carpino said. “But of course, if things are a little bit warmer, well, then we get more of a rain event than a snow one.”
While Accuweather, based in College Station, Pa., doesn’t release its official winter forecast until Oct. 2, Paul Pastelok, senior meteorologist and lead U.S. long-range forecaster, said there are clues when looking at El Niño and La Niña.
“What I’m seeing right now for the Northeast is that there could be a situation in December where we get a couple of cold shots coming down out of Canada of significance, and maybe some snow out of that as well,” Pastelok said. “But that may not be the overall dominance for the entire month of December. It’s just a couple events that could set in to knock temperatures down.”
He said La Niña is expected to be weak this year, “and if that’s the case, the weaker the signal of La Niña or ENSO is … it opens up a can of worms for any other signals to be stronger and more dominant, and that makes the forecast from this far out quite uncertain on details.”
If a weak La Niña develops in late fall and peaks in December or January, “that would signify a little bit more dominance of the northern jet stream,” Pastelok said. “A lot of times in the winter, you have a split in the jet stream pattern coming across the globe, and one jet stream comes out of the north that brings the cold, and the other one is the moist jet stream in the south.
“One will go way up into Alaska and come down through western Canada, and then the other one goes down underneath, way down through Mexico and down along the Gulf Coast,” Pastelok said.
He said there is already a cold front building up in Siberia.
“Once the cold starts building there, it translates to Alaska, translates to Canada, and then we’ll see how that gets pulled down,” he said. “We’re starting to see it a little bit earlier than normal, but it’s starting to get going up there.”
The northern jet stream is the one that affects our weather. “Leaning towards the northern jet being a little bit stronger … is probably the idea to go this winter,” Pastelok said.
“During the winter time, what we meteorologists get excited about is when those two try to come together again in the east, similar to what we saw back in the 2013-14 winter season, where … Massachusetts, Rhode Island got hit, the mid-Atlantic got hit pretty hard with heavy snowstorms,” he said.
“The question is, where (will) be all the snow? Where’s it going to fall?” he said. “Because it’s a weak signal, we think this could be a winter where it kind of divides out. Some areas might be getting hit at different times of the winter season. … And that’s why we’re having a difficult time trying to pinpoint that timing.”
While the weather patterns look like they’ll bring more snow to the East Coast, Pastelok said, “I’m not saying it gets down to Hartford. I’m not saying it gets down to New Haven, the coast. But it could be that we could see some snow in December this year, something we haven’t seen too often happen in the recent past.
“It’s always been taking time to get into January, which is kind of normal,” he said. “But this year, there may be a couple sneaky systems we’ll have to watch in December and see how far south that rain/snow line ends up getting because of some colder air that could form.”
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