Old Farmer's Almanac predicts warmer than normal winter
Butler County residents will have mild temperatures and little snow in the first days of the new year, but winter is expected to bite back by the end of January.
That’s the forecast from the Old Farmer’s Almanac, whose prediction of a warmer-than-normal December in the Ohio Valley forecast region, including Butler County, proved accurate.
Editor Tim Clark of the 225-year-old almanac, based in Dublin, N.H., said December’s average temperature was about 8 degrees higher than normal.
Clark said, “Our prediction for the first week of January is mild and sunny weather with rain. The next week the rain changes to snow and it gets sunny but it’s going to be very, very cold Jan. 8 through the 10th.”
Clark said, “This winter the jet stream is in a wavy pattern which has led to surprising warmth up north. It’s pushing warm air into the Arctic and pushing cold air down south.
“This means slightly above-normal temperatures in January, but we’re seeing snowstorms in late January and early to mid-February,” Clark said.
“We’re foreseeing snowstorms in the period of Feb. 9 to the 13th and through to the end of March.
“Still, the temperatures will be above normal for the winter. There will be some snow-and-rain and snow periods in January,” Clark said.
“Rainy periods and mild temperatures followed by cold really seems to be fitting the wavy jet stream patterns,” Clark said.
John Darnley, a meteorologist with the Pittsburgh office of the National Weather Service, said the warmer-than-normal weather so far this winter is the result of several factors.
“Our thinking earlier in the fall was leaning toward a La Niña,” he said referring to an occurrence of cooler-than-average sea surface temperatures in the Pacific Ocean.
“And it did occur, but it’s been weak to neutral which led to a standing ridge of high pressure over the Aleutian Islands which forces colder air from Canada south,” he said.
But this has been countered by the lack of a strong cyclonic air flow over the Great Lakes, resulting in a series of low pressure fronts bringing warm air followed by high pressure fronts bringing cold air into Western Pennsylvania.
“This has made for really strong differences in warm/cold temperatures,” Darnley said. “The cyclonic flow hasn’t dominated the weather this winter.”
He noted that there were only 5.2 inches of snow recorded in December, about 2 inches below the average recorded for the month.
However, Darnley said, the mild, warm winter weather could be drawing to an end.
He said projections indicate the cyclonic winds over the Great Lakes will strengthen, meaning they will draw cold air from the north and moisture from the Gulf of Mexico and the Atlantic Ocean, bringing, he said, more-than-normal snowfall from the end of January through February and March.
Going further into the future, the Almanac predicts April and May temperatures also will be warmer than normal, while summer will be cooler and slightly drier than normal.
The Almanac claims an 80 percent success rate.
The Almanac began in 1792 when Thomas, a Massachusetts farmer, printed 3,000 copies of an almanac containing his weather predictions for 1793.
