Winter forecast

WxNut2.0

Nov 12, 2019 at 10:24am Edited

A close friend of mine prepared a winter outlook that I figured I'd share. The author of this is an excellent seasonal forecaster and he did a really great job here: Winter forecast

max_weisenfeld

Nov 12, 2019 at 10:43am

Second John and NY Metro Weather as a reliable and no-nonsense forecaster.

Conclusion: Our current expectation is for temperatures to average near or slightly above average in NYC, with near or slightly above average snowfall. The worst of the Winter will likely be observed from mid to late January into early February.

So - what is our average snowfall? Would a weak to neutral el nino mean there's a less chance of heavy snowstorms?

WxNut2.0

Nov 12, 2019 at 12:02pm

jamie said:
Conclusion: Our current expectation is for temperatures to average near or slightly above average in NYC, with near or slightly above average snowfall. The worst of the Winter will likely be observed from mid to late January into early February.
So - what is our average snowfall? Would a weak to neutral el nino mean there's a less chance of heavy snowstorms?

NYC/suburbs gets about 36 inches of snow per year on average, so this is a fair expectation. That said, as a straight average gives equal weighting to winters where we got a series of large storms and those in which we got virtually no snow, its difficult to pinpoint how that 36 inches will get distributed throughout the season. This kind of works into the second point though, which is it's difficult to predict any individual event in a seasonal forecast. The slow-evolving, large scale pattern (impacted by El Nino) would certainly support a couple of big storms however.