A look to the weather ahead

El Niño is Spanish for The Niño

Whether we’re cursing heavy fall snow or counting berries on bushes, our homespun ways of predicting winter weather are usually just shots in the dark. It’d be nice to market a monster storm on the horizon or know when to stock up on supplies, but reliable season-long forecasts are tough to come by.

But that doesn’t stop people from pouring money and manpower into the pursuit of a pinpoint weather prediction, or even a general idea.
For a fee, websites will give long-range weather forecasts for your neighborhood. For $5, the Old Farmer’s Almanac will give a horoscope-like prediction for temperature and precipitation in huge regions, from Spokane past Salt Lake or from northern Maine to Manhattan.
If you take the latter, cheaper option you might think this winter could be warmer and wetter than the 30-year average, as the Almanac predicts. The heaviest snowfall will come during the middle and latter parts of December and January, it says.
Crested Butte Mountain Resort will tell you that they’re “certainly hoping for a very snowy year,” but won’t share its own long-range look at the weather.
Jim Daniels, a meteorologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Grand Junction, says the long-range forecasts he references are completed by the Climate Prediction Center in Washington, D.C., based on the same 30-year average that the Almanac uses.
According to those forecasts, Colorado will be a little warmer than normal, but “there won’t be any appreciable increase in the amount of moisture.” Over the last 30 years, Crested Butte has averaged around 200 inches of snow a year and been coldest in January, when high temperatures have averaged out to 28°F and the lows at 4 below zero.
State Climatologist Nolan Doesken, who has been studying the weather for more than 30 years, uses a century’s worth of Colorado weather data for a look into the future. But he’s gotten out of the weather-guessing game simply because “weather patterns are so variable.” Instead, he sticks to “trends.”
This year, Doesken is placing a lot of emphasis on the trends relating to El Niño—when warm surface waters circulate in the tropical Pacific Ocean, affecting weather patterns across the globe—and how those trends can affect weather in Colorado.
El Niño is short for El Niño de Navidad, “the Christmas Child,” from the time of year when the currents change.
Doesken says this is shaping up to be a moderate or strong El Niño year, which could mean a few things for the Gunnison Valley.
“As the El Niño wisdom goes, there’s a higher likelihood of a split flow of storm tracks; one of moist air that comes up from the Gulf of Mexico, across southern states to Florida and Georgia, and the other with drier conditions in the northern and central Rockies,” he says.
What makes predicting the weather in Gunnison County, and most of central Colorado, such a gamble is guessing which of the storm tracks will have its way in the region.
The weather models used by the Climate Prediction Center and NOAA show the area roughly south of Interstate 70 as apt to get the storms from the south. But a more detailed map developed by University of Colorado researcher Klaus Wolter shows that line of moisture running farther south than Gunnison, near Ouray.
“It is statistical, but it’s not indicative of every year,” Doesken says of Wolter’s model. “If you remember, we predicted a fairly dry winter two years ago and it absolutely went the other way. So you never really know how much moisture you’re going to get.”