News

Snow or no? Speranza makes winter prediction

Will we need ice melt?

By Bill Moss, Published: November 12, 2013

WTZQ weather forecaster Paul Speranza predicts a warmer than normal December and January, meaning less chance of a big snow this winter.

During his annual winter weather forecast on WTZQ radio station on Oct. 17, Speranza predicted a milder winter than the Old Farmers Almanac and some other forecasters have projected. The almanac is projecting a cold winter in the East with a lot of snow.
After record rain this spring and summer, the southern mountains have seen a dry spell, with below normal rainfall in August and September.
"If you don't have the Southern jet bringing up this moisture, you can have all the cold you want, you may end up with no snow because you've got to have moisture to work with the snow," he said.
A high pressure ridge, he said, will block the cold for most of the winter.
"I think we'll be about a degree below normal in November and precipitation above," he said. "Then we get into December and January I think we're going to see the Southeast ridge developing across the Southeast United States. December should be at least two to three degrees above normal, January at least two degrees above normal, and once again precipitation during that time is going to be below normal."
If the ridge breaks up, the mountains could get snow.
"If we get the cold, if you get one storm to come out of the Gulf, it's just like the blizzard of '93," he said, recalling a mild winter before the biggest snowstorm in a generation. "You had nothing all year but then you had 18-plus inches depending on where you were in the county. Further west they had two to three feet, the Smokies had three to five feet. It's just a matter of how everything unfolds."
Speranza acknowledged that other models show colder weather and heavy snow. But the European model was right last year, he added, when it called for a mild winter that did come to pass. Speranza called for a colder winter last year, missing the forecast, but he noted that he got it right predicting a pattern of heavy rain throughout the spring and summer.
"I'm putting a lot of eggs in that basket" by predicting the pattern that blocks cold air from the west, he said. "I could have jumped in with everyone else and say we're going to have a very cold winter but that keeps coming on the European models that shows we're going to have this ridge develop, and last year if people had looked at that model, we would not have talked about December being cold. ... If that (blocking ridge) does not materialize, we could have quite a winter."