Sure, it's six weeks before the calendar says you're due. And it seems like just a mid-Indian summer snooze ago we were talking wildfires and record-breaking heat.
But this is November. This is Montana. What's with these 50-degree days? What's with the dust?
Winter, where are you?
“I can tell you we're entering into a little more active period, in which we'll see a little more precipitation around the area,” Jennifer Via ventured Friday.
A meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Missoula, Via said 4 to 6 inches of snow may fall this weekend up in the mountains. Way up, that is - above 6,000 feet.
Down below, expect rain, and that's not winter.
The rain will precede a cold front on Saturday night and Sunday. But behind that: nothing but what looks like a similar pattern next week of warm, then cold, then dry.
Winter, where are you?
“As far as getting out into long-range predictions, it gets a lot more squirrelly to say exactly what's going to happen this winter,” Via said.
There is science behind the squirreliness.
We are six months or so into the latest La Nina, the phenomenon of global weather that starts with the cooling of waters off the coast of South America.
La Nina and its counterpart, El Nino, each affect different regions in different ways. Texas and other Southwestern states are hunkering down for a long, dry winter and blaming La Nina, which is Spanish for “the little girl.”
She supposedly pushes the cold and precipitation farther north, to our neck of the woods.
But Via said it's not that simple. La Ninas come in three flavors - weak, moderate and strong. There hasn't been a strong one for years. The 2007 version is moderate.
“With the strong La Ninas, typically you have a colder and moister pattern. With a moderate one, it's been pretty variable, especially over the last 10 or 15 years,” Via said.
“So it's very much up in the air at this point whether or not we'll have a good amount of snow this year.”
Winter, where are you?
George Taylor of the Oregon Climate Service was among the climate experts and meteorologists in Oregon who gathered Friday in Portland for the annual “What Will Winter Be Like” debate.
Taylor told the Oregonian going in that he'd revised an earlier forecast to reflect a stronger La Nina effect.
“I'm leaning toward even colder and wetter, with abundant mountain snowpacks,” Taylor said. “The La Nina is much better defined than last year - right up there with the strongest we've ever seen.”
Taylor said the ocean waters off South America are the coldest since 1950.
But Via's counterparts at the National Weather Service in Portland aren't so sure. Steve Todd of the bureau called this a moderate La Nina, and told the Oregonian there's a 50-50 chance Oregon will experience normal winter temperatures and typical precipitation.
The Weather Service, both Via and Todd pointed out, prefers to focus its forecasting on the next eight days, not the next eight weeks, months or years.
There's no question we're starting November off dry. Missoula would typically have almost a quarter-inch of precipitation by this time. There's been none so far and Halloween, often a bad-weather standby, didn't do the trick or the treat.
Rain and snow were slightly down last month, and after a wet spring, western Montana continues to lag three full inches behind past years - 8.93 inches in '07, 11.92 on average in other years.
October included some abnormal temperature spikes, including a 78-degree day on Oct. 9 in Missoula and an Oct. 24th that set records of 66 degrees in Missoula and 72 in Kalispell and Butte.
But all in all, it was slightly cooler than normal in Missoula - normal being measured from 1971 to 2000. Highs did reach 2 degrees above average in Kalispell.
The abnormality of October was its warm nights. Low temperatures in Missoula were 3.7 degrees above what we're used to.
That's all a matter of record. The year's first snow dump is pure speculation.
The Climate Prediction Center in Maryland said La Nina will likely continue into early 2008, and she's buffing up.
“La Nina continued to strengthen during October 2007, as equatorial sea surface temperature anomalies became increasingly negative from 170 degrees east to the South American coast,” the CPC said in its monthly report released Thursday.
You probably have neither time nor inclination to decipher any more, but the report does go on to predict above-average precipitation this winter in the Northern Rockies - that's us - as well as in northern California and southern and eastern regions of the Pacific Northwest.
“I'll just say I wouldn't put a lot of stock in those (long-range forecasts),” Via said.
How about a white Christmas?
She laughed.
“I'm not going to jump out on that limb.”
Reporter Kim Briggeman can be reached at 523-5266 or at kbriggeman@missoulian.com
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