Winter outlook: Warm south, cooler north

Federal forecasters predict this winter may paint the U.S. in stripes of different weather: Warmer and drier than normal in the south, and colder and wetter than usual in the far north.

The National Weather Service winter outlook , issued Thursday, gets murky in the nation’s middle belt, with no particular expectation for trends in temperature or precipitation.

Still, some nasty storms might make the winter there memorable, said Mike Halpert, deputy director of the weather service’s Climate Prediction Center.

The major driver of the winter forecast is a budding La Niña, a cooling of the central Pacific that warps weather worldwide and is the flip side of the better-known El Niño, Halpert said.

For the South and California, “the big story is likely to be drought,” Halpert said.

And that’s not good news for California, which is in year five of its drought. The winter is the state’s crucial wet season when snow and rain gets stored up. Halpert said the state’s winter looks to come up dry, especially in Southern California.

“It’s probably going to take a couple of wet winters in a row to put a big dent into this drought now,” said weather service drought expert David Miskus. He said it will take “many, many years and it’s got to be above normal precipitation.”

The northern cold band that the weather service predicts is mostly from Montana to Michigan. Maine is the exception, with unusually warm weather expected.

The prediction center’s track record on its winter outlooks is about 25 percent better than random chance for temperature and slightly less than that for precipitation, Halpert said.