The first snowflakes in western Virginia appear to have barely beaten out what for many was the first frost.
There was at least one social media report of a Boy Scout troop encountering snow in the mile-high terrain of Grayson Highlands this weekend. Combined with similar reports of snow at comparable elevations in North Carolina and West Virginia, we can safely declare that the 2026-27 snow season has begun.
Scattered to widespread frost followed Sunday through Tuesday mornings in Cardinal News’ Southwest and Southside Virginia coverage area. Many locations dropped to freezing or below to end the growing season.
The latter part of this week may provide a couple more frosty mornings as a calm, dry classic autumn pattern of cool to cold mornings, mild to warm afternoons continues. Leaves will be getting more colorful for what, thanks to recent rain and cold mornings, may turn into an overperforming foliage season compared to many expectations in our region, given the long-term drought.
The wet storm track over the South consistent with typical El Niño cool season patterns may start showing up around Halloween, but we’ll leave that to revisit next week.
Crash course in El Niño snowfall
El Niño looms over the coming winter, and not just any El Niño, but what appears destined to become the strongest El Niño in the modern era of records over the last three-quarters of a century.
El Niño refers to the irregularly recurring warming of sea surface temperatures in a stripe of the Pacific Ocean.
One key index measuring El Niño is already at 1.7 degrees C (3.1 degrees F) above normal for the July-August-September period, which should it sustain for five overlapping three-month periods would already put this El Niño among the top few on record. It is not expected to merely sustain, but go even higher, likely exceeding the 2.3-2.4 range reached in the 1982-83, 1997-98 and 2015-16 events.
There are two big opposing ideas often expressed regarding what our region’s snowfall will be like during a stronger El Niño.
· A strong El Niño will lead to epic snowfall.
· A strong El Niño will cause a “torch” winter of frequent warm temperatures and very little snowfall.
Looking at the history of the stronger El Niño winters in the past three-quarters of a century, the truth isn’t somewhere between those extremes, but rather, a mix of both.
The 10 strongest El Niño episodes — when the equatorial Pacific Ocean sea surface temperatures were the warmest — since modern observation standards began in 1950 reveal a strong tendency toward a “feast or famine” pattern regarding snowfall in Southwest and Southside Virginia.
Sometimes, feast and famine alternate in the same season.
Perhaps no El Niño winter better exemplified that than 2015-16, which gave us a warm Christmas, an 8- to 14-inch snowstorm in late January, another 4- to 10-inch snowfall in much of our region in mid-February, then only nine days after that, the deadly and destructive Appomattox County tornado.
The other two winters since 2000 on this list, both barely qualifying among the 10 strongest El Ninõs, went opposite directions.
Excluding some more moderate amounts in parts of Southside, the 2009-10 winter is the big dog of the 21st century thus far in our region, with three large snowstorms that added up 3-5 feet total for the season. The 2023-24 winter, by contrast, was warm and wet, with essentially only one week of winter in January and one significant snowfall — a few 6-plus totals in Southwest Virginia west of Interstate 77, and 1-4 inches elsewhere, except nothing near Martinsville and Danville.
Roanoke’s 43 inches of snow in January 1966 stands as the city’s greatest snowfall for a single month in over a century of records, part of a very snowy strong El Niño winter in the extremely snowy 1960s. But seven years later, the 1972-73 El Niño winter produced single-digit snowfall totals in much of our region — and, famously to our north, Philadelphia’s only snowless winter on record.
A decade after that, the 1982-83 El Niño winter gave much of the central and eastern U.S. a warm and stormy Christmas, but then Virginia and the eastern U.S. experienced a huge February snowstorm that was the first widespread foot-plus snowfall in our region in 14 years. The 1986-87 El Niño winter dumped 3-5 feet of snow on much of our region for the season, a big chunk of it coming in two storms three days apart in January, with another big plop along and west of the Blue Ridge as late as the first week of April.
But a similarly strong El Niño five years later in 1991-92 provided a second consecutive low-snowfall winter across our region.
The 1997-98 El Niño winter was warm and wet with one particularly large wet snowstorm from the Blue Ridge westward in late January. That winter had a split personality across our region between the mountains and east of the Blue Ridge. Burke’s Garden in Tazewell County ended up with almost 80 inches of snow that winter; South Boston in Halifax County barely cracked 2 inches.
Forty years earlier, a mid-February storm during the 1957-58 El Niño winter flipped that map to some extent, dumping its foot-plus totals on eastern parts of our region, from Danville to Appomattox, with lesser amounts to the west amid what was a moderately snowy and pretty cold winter in a not-that-wintry 1950s decade.
This has been a quick crash course on the 10 strongest El Niño winters and snowfall across Southwest and Southside Virginia. There were other weaker El Niño winters and lots of granular details on temperatures and precipitation patterns we may revisit down the road.
Too warm to be compared to history?
Some question has been raised about whether this El Niño will end up so strong that these previous examples, even the strongest ones like 1982-83, 1997-98, and 2015-16, won’t offer much guidance as templates for what may happen this coming season.
Would the strongest El Niño on record combined with warming global temperatures at their human-observation peak lead to such a flood of warm, moist air that winter is practically a no-show? Or could it also lead to strong blocking highs with warming in northern latitudes that force cold air southward to meet moisture from big Southern U.S. storms for heavy snow on their northern flank near us?
El Niño, of course, does not act alone. Snowy El Niño winters like 1965-66, 1986-87, and 2009-10 featured strong high pressure blocking near the North Pole and Greenland, the negative phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation, with frequent and extensive pushes of Arctic air. That blocking pattern was rare in our low-snow El Niño winters like 1972-73, 1991-92, and our most recent, 2023-24.
Most long-range forecasts by computers and humans are going to focus on the strength of El Niño and tilt warm and wet with the coming winter. But even at that, just one or two big winter storms in an otherwise mild winter could entirely alter our perception of it. And there is at least some chance a weak polar vortex allows Arctic air to slide southward to meet an El Niño-charged subtropical jet stream for historic snowfall somewhere in or near our region.
In two or three weeks, we’re going to ask for your guesses in the annual snowfall prediction contest. You’ll be asked to project annual snowfall for three locations in a list of 10 scattered across our region.
Do you roll the dice high on this winter having two or three big snowstorms? Or roll it low on being a warm and almost snowless winter? Or something in between with long mild periods but one snowy interlude? Or maybe pick a site in Southside to get very little snow while one in the Southwest gets a ton?
Feast or famine may mean bust or boom with snowfall prognostication.
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.
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