Big Snows Coming: I Almost Guarantee it Do you see that the daylight is changing? It’s a subtle thing, but I always notice this time of year that the slant of the light begins to change. The sun isn’t directly overhead anymore, and instead of the sunlight washing everything out most of the day, there seems to be more contrast everywhere. With that shift comes the first hints that the seasons are changing. I can park my dark green Trooper on the street in front of the house now and it doesn’t turn into an oven in five minutes. And now, even if it gets up to 90 degrees outside in the daytime, it’s only for an hour or so instead of four or five hours. I get excited about this stuff, because I know winter is on the way—the best season of the year. I’m not a skier or a snowboarder, and I hate driving in it, but I love the snow. Let me have two hours and 300 bucks in a Costco down the hill to get ready for it, and then, like Bing sang—let it snow for three weeks straight for all I care. I’ve got an 11-year-old and a 7-year-old, but guess who is the only one with his nose pressed up against the window when a cold storm is on the way? Yep. The kids are downstairs watching T.V. knowing they won’t miss a snowflake, because as soon the first one lands, Dad will be falling all over himself doing cannonballs down the stairs, yelling for them to look out the window. They know Dad’s got the Intellicast satellite loop on one computer refreshing every 10 minutes and the AccuWeather enhanced local radar on the other, and he’s also running into his room every ten minutes to watch the last three seconds of “Your Local on the 8’s” on the Weather Channel, in which they show the latest three ticks of the West Coast combination satellite/radar loop. Doesn’t everybody do this? I get really bummed out when I watch on the Internet for 10 hours as one of those classic counterclockwise curly Q’s comes barreling down the coast straight at us with an inch or two of moisture falling an hour, and it gets to about Burbank and then just dies. I’m depressed for days after one of those. If you’ve never written a formal complaint to a meteorologist in the National Weather Service office in San Diego, I guess you can’t relate to people like me. (I don’t commute, so I have a lot of free time, O.K.?). Hey, for four days straight they had said there was a 70- or 80-percent chance of rain, and we got nothing but a few clouds. I had to complain in writing. Their excuse? There was a 20- or 30-percent chance that it wouldn’t rain, of course. We have a lot of friends down the hill and clients in different parts of the country. One guy I work with lives in Chicago and laughs when I tell him about the snow in Southern California. He calls me a wimp or some such when I tell him it’s tough going up here because the plows haven’t come yet. A few years ago I was telling him about the huge snowfall we just had and he nearly fell over laughing on the phone, telling me they just got a foot of snow there in Chicago and egging me on to beat that. Oh yeah? This is where digital cameras earn their keep. I hung up the phone, pried open my door, walked over the snow that was higher than my deck railing and took a picture of my kids sledding on a hill of snow on my driveway. I e-mailed my colleague in Chicago the photo a few minutes later, and then got him back on the phone. “You see that little hill of snow my kids are sledding on?” I asked. “That’s a Subaru Impreza. You see the big hill behind the little hill? That’s an Isuzu Trooper.” He doesn’t laugh so much anymore. That’s what I want to see happen this year—a progression of storms that beats the one a few years ago that dumped three feet of snow on us. That was neither an El Nino nor a La Nina year, but nature doesn’t seem to care about those things that preoccupy so many meteorologists. I always watch for the monthly “Current Diagnostic Discussion” of El Nino and La Nina among meteorologists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Web site. (I don’t commute, so I have a lot of free time, O.K.?). This year, they were all predicting a La Nina, the cooling of the ocean that can cause drought here in the West. As late as June they were saying La Nina was continuing to develop, then in July they said it was “playing possum,” and now they’re scratching their heads wondering what happened to it. So they can’t even begin to give us a good long-range forecast, because they’re befuddled. So it looks like we’re in the for the same kind of year in which we got some huge snowstorms. I’m going to go out on a limb and give it a 90-percent chance of being a great year for snow. You notice I’m doing my meteorologist thing and giving myself that 10-percent margin so that I can wiggle (or is that weasel?) out of my prediction if I need to. Stay tuned. |
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