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This winter will be much different than the last one.
That is the prediction I feel most sure in making about the winter ahead for Cardinal News coverage area of Southwest and Southside Virginia. But I’ll get to a few others – and you can do the same by entering the second Cardinal Weather snowfall contest, instructions for which appear at the end of this article.
Snow fans will automatically read into “much different” that “he’s saying it’s going to snow a bunch,” and that could very well happen. Last winter was a historically mild and snowless one across almost all of Southwest and Southside Virginia. If “different” ends up being “opposite,” the 2023-24 winter could be the bookend to 2022-23 and we’ll talk about the sharp year-to-year contrast between these consecutive winters for many decades forward. Based on the history of several El Niño winters, that possibility is at least on the table.
But what I really mean is that the 2023-24 winter will, in my best estimation, not repeat the long, stable, mild and dry periods of the 2022-23 winter. The cold air masses that were so tepid after the brief but extreme Arctic punch at Christmas last winter will be deeper this time, though alternating with similarly steep warmups. And there will be many more wet storm systems that at least have a chance at doing something wintry, though of course, only some of them will do so.
There will be more weather this winter than there was last winter, I project. More rain, more variable temperatures, more cold air, and, quite likely, more snow and ice. But then, for most locations in our region, it wouldn’t take even a full inch to have more snow than last winter.
Even some of the foremost weather experts are arguing about whether El Niño, the warming of equatorial Pacific Ocean sea-surface temperatures that has been ongoing since spring and has correlations to various weather patterns around the world, is solidly east-based or becoming more west-based, and whether or not it is on track to become among the strongest on record or something toward the high end of moderate. The general idea is that strong, east-based El Niño patterns lead to milder temperatures accompanying a wet pattern for the Eastern U.S., while more west-based and moderate El Niño patterns lead to more Eastern U.S. cold intrusions. But these correlations are not iron-clad.
Beyond El Niño, a persistent negative phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation – cooler sea surface temperatures in the northern Pacific – often generally leads to more west-coast troughing and eastern U.S. ridging, i.e. milder temperatures for the East. But since spring, we’ve also seen recurring negative phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation than we’ve seen in several years, with blocking high pressure over Greenland buckling the jet stream southward. And we don’t know quite what to do with a record warm Atlantic Ocean – southeast ridge deflecting cold air and some storm systems away from Virginia, or Greenland ridge helping drive colder air southward to meet wet storm systems for more snow?
I won’t bore you with the meteorological alphabet soup of the MJO (Madden-Julien Oscillation), QBO (Quasi-Biennial Oscillation) and others. But several of these factors and advanced long-range modeling suggest a warmer start to this winter in our region but perhaps getting colder toward the middle and latter part of the winter. That would be opposite from last winter’s trends, but could be similar to 1982-83 and 2015-16 winters, both strong El Niño winters that were toasty at Christmas but had large winter storms for our region in January and/or February.
Waiting until after the new year wouldn’t sit well with hungry snow fans after the barren 2022-23 winter, but the wallop could be worth the wait.
The current forecast over the next couple of weeks, however, suggests a generally colder than normal weather pattern through the last part of November into early December. We’ll see if that might squeeze out some early snow – and, hopefully, more wetness like Tuesday’s to continue eroding the drought and dousing fires – before a probable (but not certain) build toward milder weather by mid-December.
My reasoning for “more weather” is that El Niño winters, historically, tend to be dynamic with multiple wet storm systems and temperature variations, and, on top of that, there appear to be lots of potential conflict between various climatic oscillations – so more potential for big temperature shifts and strong storm systems.
Most winter forecasts focus on average temperatures compared to normal and precipitation totals. My generalized call for Southwest and Southside Virginia on those:
· Normal to slightly milder than normal temperatures on average.
· Slightly to moderately above normal precipitation.
· Slightly above normal snowfall – possibly much above normal if there are one or two very large snowstorms.
El Niño winters have a certain “feast or famine” quality when it comes to snowfall in our region. That is, there are many examples of winters with either large cumulative totals or major winter storms – four of the last five foot-plus snowstorms dumping at least a foot on half our region have occurred during El Niño winters – but there are some with very little snow at many locations and not many toward the middle. So, all of the snowfall forecasts you may have seen on media or social media, many tilting to larger amounts based on our history with El Niño, are fraught with peril for potentially busting big.
Many people tend to box winters into “cold and snowy” or “mild and not snowy,” but this could be a “mild and snowy” winter – again, like 2015-16, which might be the best recent template for what could happen. The region experienced near-record warmth at Christmas, but widespread snowfall of 6-10 inches in Southside and 10+ to the west on January 22-23, and much of the region north of the immediate North Carolina border counties got 5-10 inches on Feb. 14-15.
My projection is there will be three to five storms that dump plowable snow (3 or more inches) on at least half of our Southwest/Southside Virginia region, with one or two storms that will drop 6 or more inches on at least half of the region. The chances of a foot-plus storm range from about 20 percent over Southside to 40 percent west of Interstate 81 – and lest you think those are low percentages, they are about double what you would expect on average for a random winter. There will of course be some other storm systems that dump snow on a more limited part of our region and some smaller systems that raise totals more locally, especially in western and higher elevation areas. And we’ll probably get our share of ice and wintry mix, too.
In the snowfall contest section below, I have put my guesses on how much total snow will fall this winter at 12 sites scattered across our region. I readily admit these are “somewhat educated guesses.” Yours may be better. Be sure and send them in, following the rules described below.
Enter the Cardinal Weather snowfall contest
Is there a better way to help celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday than for the family to guess how much snowfall the winter ahead will hold at three of 12 locations in the Cardinal News coverage area?
You have till midnight Sunday to email me your guesses, following the rules below. A $25 gift card and notoriety of your forecasting prowess await – which I’ll boost to $50 for first and $25 for second place with 500 or more entries. We’re not close to that yet.
One update: I have added Wise as a location you can pick for. I did this after hearing from a reader that I didn’t have a location close enough to the southwest corner, and also because last week I said there were 12 sites to pick from and really there were only 11. Now there are 12 with Wise added.
Wise has averaged 41 inches of snow since 2000, with a maximum of 79 in the 2009-10 winter and a low of 4 last winter. (For similar parameters that might help you guide your picks on the other 11 sites, look back at the bottom section of my last column, linked here).
Please read the instructions below carefully.
(1) Email weather@cardinalnews.org with the subject line “Snowfall Contest.” (I don’t disqualify entries for different subject lines but it helps me sort them.)
(2) Give me your name and general location (city, town or county). It is OK for multiple people, such as a family or school class, to enter on the same email. There is no age limit for entry.
(3) Choose ANY THREE of the 12 locations listed below and guess total snowfall from December 1 to March 31, rounded to the nearest inch. (If you send me a fraction or decimal, like 13.3 or 28 ¾, I will round it for you, and halves round up.)
(4) For ANY ONE of the three sites you choose, pick the date of the first 1-inch snowfall between December 1 and March 31. (If you don’t tell me which site you’re picking the date for, I will presume it is the first one listed. If you pick first date for all three, I’ll take the first one as the entry.)
(5) The deadline for receiving entries is Sunday, November 26, at midnight – the end of Thanksgiving weekend.
Your contest score will be the total of the missed inches on the two closest of your three snowfall total choices and the missed days on your snowfall date choice. The lowest score wins.
Here are my predicted snowfall totals for each of the 12 sites. You can look back at my last column, linked here, for average, maximum and minimum seasonal snowfall since 2000.
Abingdon: 15 inches
Appomattox: 13 inches
Blacksburg: 30 inches
Bluefield, W.Va.: 45 inches
Danville: 10 inches
Lexington: 25 inches
Lynchburg: 20 inches
Martinsville: 14 inches
Roanoke: 22 inches
Tri-Cities Airport, Tenn.: 12 inches
Wise: 45 inches
Wytheville: 24 inches
Journalist Kevin Myatt has been writing about weather for 20 years. His weekly column, appearing on Wednesdays, is sponsored by Oakey’s, a family-run, locally-owned funeral home with locations throughout the Roanoke Valley.
