VirginiaWx has been busy with his non social media life and is late on his winter outlook. My historical methods included readig a ton of outlooks by others, combing through what I like and what I don't like then really analyzing local climo records to see what happened in the analog years.
Winter outlooks are fickle in that one storm can make or break a snowfall outlook and if it's not snowing, people don't care about cold. Last winter we had the big December event. Funny in that Danville didn't have any measureable snow after that event and all stations got near normal to above and actually was about 150% of normal with the 15 inches during the big storm.
Winter 19-20:
Temps 1-2 degrees above normal, snowfall near normal. Best chances for snow/ice will be in the second half of winter.
Long term averages is 22 in Blacksburg, 19 in Roanoke, 17 in Lynchburg and 10 in Danville.
Positives: QBO trends, Ring of warmth in the pacific Northwest, neutral conditions tend to favor colder winters. Good Eruasian Snowcover.
Negatives: Lack of strong evidence that supports a more harsh winter, some of the analog years were duds Long pattern of persistent warms, NAO ran negative most of the summer. IN those samples only 2-13 had negative NAO winters.
Looks like we will have a cold November. This may lead to a flip warm in December which works well with my backloaded winter.
I'll start to tweet/post ideas about events and patterns and then blog when events appear on the horion.
