Minnesota winter outlook: Could snow and El Niño collide?

Welcome back. I'm meteorologist Cody Matz. We're going to talk more El Nino. Unfortunately, Kenny Blumenfeld had to take off, but I'm going to continue the conversation, kind of bring this all to a wrap because we've been kind of working towards a point in kind of the forecast moving forward. But Kenny did provide me with some of this data from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. So check out this graphic. It is interesting to To note just how much, how strongly influenced. Our temperatures here in Minnesota are by snow cover. You know how we get snow on the ground, suddenly it feels colder? That's because it is. And so this is a study, a long-term study of snow depth based on temperature. So the left side of the screen is the average temperature when you have that much snow on the ground. So an average of 26.3 degrees when you have no snow on the ground, but you get just one inch of snow on the ground, the average temperature drops to 19.6. A seven plus degree drop in temp just because of one inch of snow, and then obviously it falls off from there. The deeper your snow cover, the more you can insulate the cold air that rolls southward out of the Arctic. And that's essentially the same thing you see on the right, it's just a little bit different way of showing it. Going from temperature kind of on the left snow depth on the bottom and all of that showing a colder trend, the deeper your snowpack is, the colder the temperature. So very, very heavily. Our temperatures in the winter very heavily based on if we can actually get some snow and keep it around. So are we going to see that this winter? The strong El Nino would suggest we probably won't. But the sudden stratospheric warming event we talked about earlier suggests we might. And here's one of the reasons why. So we talk about analogs. Basically what that means is we look back at climate, look back at what we've seen in years past, and try to find some correlation, some comparison to what we're getting now. So Amber, bring up the next graphic for me. This was the best analog for this year that we've seen. With all these components was basically December. So that winter of 2009 through kind of February, March of 2010. That's a very realistic comparison to what's happening right now as compared to 2009. Well, so what this map shows is essentially storm track and I realize you're like, where's the storm? It's indicative of kind of where there's lower pressure. So the bluer colors indicate lower pressure. The warmer colors indicate higher pressure. Well, when you have low pressure, typically you have a storm system. And so the more low pressures in that spot, the bigger the blob of blue. So you go from essentially the north central Pacific, north of Hawaii, south of Alaska, eastward into all of the central and southern US and then off the east coast into the central Atlantic. That's what we saw in 2009, 2010. Do you remember that year? If you don't, it's okay. It was cold and snowy, even by Minnesota standards. We had a very snowy winter in the Twin Cities. We had a below average December, January, and February, and a lot of snowpack. Okay, now moving forward, next graphic, Amber. This is the latest seasonal forecast from one of the global prediction models. We call it the Euro. We've tossed around Euro, GFS. If you've been paying attention back when Hurricane Sandy was a thing, you had this comparison became pop culture terms. Well, this is one of those models, it's the European model, showing a similar thing, just a little bit different. Scope a little bit different viewpoint. So center of your screen is North America. The brown blob is the very warm colors that indicates very high pressure. That's basically over the Hudson Bay, so central and northern Canada. But you look at those blobs of purple and blue, very similar locations to 2009, 2010. And we have a sudden stratospheric warming event. And so all this kind of coming together to be hyper comparable. To 2009, 2010, here's the caveat. This doesn't mean that everyone gets snow. It doesn't mean that everyone gets cold weather, but there is some suggestions that we could get a bout of cold and potentially snow to round out the month of November and start December. And since we just talked about how much winter temperatures are based off how much snow we have on the ground, if we can get some early season, early winter, early December snow, we have a better opportunity to be colder through the We'll see, that's at least a couple weeks away and certainly not on the seven day forecast. Thanks to Kenny Blumenfeld, the senior climatologist from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources for all of the help and information in the interview. And hopefully I left you with something to think about moving forward.