I had a great blog written yesterday. It took me about a half an hour to create. Then…kablooey! As I hit publish, it magically disappeared. So, I’ll try and recreate it as best as I can. No it didn’t autosave the draft like it was supposed to.
A while back I wrote a blog about the long range forecast, and it’s time to collect on some bragging rights. In early December 09′ I wrote a weather blog predicting the snow chances for this Winter through mid January. Here it is: Old Blog The forecast is towards the bottom. Looks like I did pretty good on that.
There are several reasons why we’ve had the weather that we’ve had. There has been a significant snowpack over a large portion of the country. That allows for the cold air to reside longer over a location. This has even been the case even locally with snow still on the ground up until this week north and west of the metro. Another factor has been the progressive pattern that we’ve been in. That means that systems have been moving through rather quickly. One reason for that is the weather pattern in the Atlantic Ocean called the North Atlantic Oscillation. It is somewhat similar to El Nino, but is in the Atlantic. It has been negative for a while, which I believe has promoted that quick moving. This allowed a lot of systems to move into a cold airmass before any southerly winds could warm us up as in previous years. Also, I’ve heard a little about the Arctic Oscillation, and heard that it has been negative as well. Here is a great reference from NASA the explains it for this Winter. Scroll to the bottom for reading. This phenomenon is supposed to allow for cold air to keep moving down out of Canada. The southern branch of the jetstream has been pretty active too. All of this has added up to help us get snow. We’ve had 8.3″ of snow at Norfolk so far this year. Much higher amounts north/west of Norfolk.
After that paragraph of true nerdiness, here are some numbers. These are the number of days with high temperatures below 50 degrees for the December, January, February period for the last 4 years.
2009/2010: December- 16, January-20, February-16*
2008/2009: December-7, January-21, February-11
2007/2008: December-8, January-16, February-8
2006/2007: December-5, January-14, February-18
*Month not over yet.
I got this info from the National Weather Service’s website. It required a lot of adding, so hopefully I didn’t miscount. You can see that the last 2 years were noticeably colder, but there was also a cold period in February of 07′. I remember that power bill. Whoa! I also did the number of days below 40 degrees, but maybe that’s too many numbers for this blog. Just know that There were much more this year compared to 2006-2009.
Going forward, I think this pattern will keep up for a while. We’ll probably have the brief warmup this week, and then return to the cold pattern by next weekend. We easily have more chances for snow until probably mid April. Remember we have had chances for snow up through April for the last 2 years. Maybe 3. We’ll probably start to see some more large systems as we go into March. Probably more Nor’easters or coastal runners. The northern and southern branches of the jetstream will probably phase/merge more often creating these bigger systems. I expect that overall we’ll stay cool for the next couple of months. We’ll probably start to get some brief warmups. More brief than usual. I’m looking forward to some warmer temperatures. Highs on Monday will be in the upper 50s in some areas. We’ll definetely cool down towards next weekend though. There’s no snow in the 7 day forecast, but we may see a good sized system Wednesday into Thursday. Wind and rain are forecast, but some far inland sections could see a little snow at the end. We’ll see.
Meteorologist: Jeremy Wheeler