Daily News | Forecasters cast yet another early vote for a mild winter in Philly
For those who view winter as a punitive experience, the long-range forecasters continue to send their warm wishes, with the early seasonal outlooks not showing much love for snow partisans or plow contractors.
The government’s Climate Prediction Center on Thursday joined the likes of AccuWeather Inc. and Weather.com in saying the scientific tea leaves favor a generally mild Dec. 1 to Feb. 28 period — the meteorological winter — in the Philadelphia region and in much of the Mid-Atlantic. The state of the atmosphere also argues for below-normal snowfall along the Northeast Corridor, Jon Gottschalck, chief of the climate center’s Operational Prediction Branch, said at teleconference. Don’t throw away the shovel just yet, however. While long-range forecasters almost always skate on thin ice, Gottschhalck and others advise that this time around the ice may be membrane thin.The waters over thousands of miles in the tropical Pacific remain abnormally cool, a La Niña event, and likely to stay that way through the winter. This one is unusual in that it is entering its third winter, a so-called triple-dip La Niña. Since weather tends to move west-to-east, the cooling of the overlying air out that way affects upper-air currents to deliver systems to the United States. But this would be only the third triple-dip La Niña in records dating to 1950, and Gottschalck said that’s too paltry of a sample on which to draw conclusions. The last time it happened was during the winter of 2000-01, quite a cold and eventful one around here. The one before that, 1975-76, was for the most part yawn-worthy.La Niña does appear to favor displacing East Coast storm tracks to the west, he said, and thus coastal storms would be apt bring warm air off the ocean inland, arguing against big snows for the I-95 cities. Worth noting, however, is that La Niña, which reduces the upper-air winds that shred incipient tropical storms, was a big reason why the consensus forecasts called for a hyper-active hurricane season in the Atlantic Basin. The tropical-storm activity has been about normal, and the season shows every sign of ending with a whimper.It’s beginning to look a lot like last winter, says Todd Crawford, veteran seasonal forecaster for weather.com, with a generally strong, which would tend to limit frigid outbreaks by confining the coldest air to the Arctic regions. That was the case last winter, which was the 12th-warmest in Philadelphia in records dating to the 1870s. When those swirling winds are weakened, cold air can spill deeply into the United States, as they did historically in Texas in the winter of 2020-21.If the vortex does visit, AccuWeather long-range forecaster Paul Pastelok says the best chances would be February.Tom DiLiberto, climate scientist with NOAA’s Climate Program Office, says you can pretty well forget about the impacts thatthat erupted on Jan. 15 and ejected a massive plume of water vapor into the stratosphere. He says that if anything it would have a “very, very slight” global-warming effect, suggesting it won’t exactly be a snow-maker.The climate center has the probabilities favoring above-normal temperatures for the region, with only a 30% chance that would end being below average.
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