Meteorologist Stick to Forecast of Milder Winter for Wisconsin 12-18-09

Despite numbing temperatures and a storm that dumped more than a foot of snow in the Madison area last week, local meteorologists are sticking by early predictions of a mild winter.

“I think that is still probably the party line,” said Jonathan Martin, chairman of atmospheric and oceanic sciences at UW-Madison. “My expectation is that we will probably end up, by the time we get to April 1, looking back at this winter and saying it was a little less snowy than normal and probably a little warmer than normal.”

Varying weather, like that southern Wisconsin has experienced in the past 10 days, can be part of what might turn out to be a warmer-than-normal winter, Martin said.

“When somebody says the winter is going to be warmer than normal, it doesn’t mean it will be absent any winter-type weather, and it’s easy to forget that after you get 16 inches of snow in one day,” he said.

Mark Gehring, a National Weather Service meteorologist, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Climate Prediction Center anticipated below-normal precipitation this winter and a 40 percent chance of above-normal temperatures in the Madison area.

The mild forecast here is due to El Nino, a warming of the water in the equatorial Pacific Ocean.

Gehring said the Climate Prediction Center looked at previous years when an El Nino pattern followed a La Nina, which occurred in the Pacific last year. That happened six times in the past century and has signaled a cool December with some snow, followed by milder conditions into January and February of the new year.

“So far it’s playing out like that,” Gehring said, predicting that another winter storm will hit the central United States, including Madison, around Christmas Eve, give or take a day or two. The intensity of that storm is unknown, Gehring said, because it’s so far out.

New snow would contribute to more snow cover, which would result in colder temperatures, he said.

Assistant State Climatologist Ed Hopkins, meanwhile, said meteorologists working on long-range forecasts are having difficulty explaining what’s going on.

“A fair amount of the country was experiencing cold conditions, when in an El Nino event it should be fairly warm,” Hopkins said. “I don’t have really any great explanation as to why this occurs.”