Forecasters: Drought more likely than blizzards

Don’t expect much of a winter wallop this year, except for the pain of worsening drought, U. S. government forecasters said Thursday.

Two-thirds of the United States should get a warmer thannormalwinter, theNational Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration predicted. Only Washington, northern Idaho, Montana, theDakotas andnorthwestern Minnesota, will get a colder than normal winter, forecasters said.

The forecast for winter rain and snow splits the nation in three stripes.

NOAA sees the entire south from southern California to North Carolina getting a drywinter. Forecasters see wetter weather for the northernmost states: Oregon and Washington to Michigan and dipping down to Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and other parts of the Ohio Valley. The rest of the nation will likely be closer to normal, NOAA said.

For the already dry Southwest and areas across the South, this could be a “big punch,” saidNOAA drought expert David Mis k us. About 45% of the nation is in drought, the highest level in more than seven years.

MikeHalpert, deputy director of NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center, said he doesn’t see much relief for central and southern California, where wildfires have been raging.

What’s driving the mostly warmer and drier winter forecast is La Nina, the cooling of parts of the central Pacific that alter weather patterns worldwide, Halpert said.

For the East, big snowstorms or blizzards aren’t usually associated with La Nina. That’s more likely with its warming ocean counterpart, El Nino, he said. But he added that extreme events are not something meteorologists can see in seasonal forecasts.

Halpert also said he doesn’t expect the dreaded polar vortex to be much of a factor this year.

The government predictions are about increased or decreased odds in what the entire threemonths of weather look like, not an individual day or storm, so don’t plan any event on a seasonal outlook, cautioned Greg Postel, a storm specialist at The Weather Channel. But he said La Nina is the strongest indicator among several for what drives winter weather. La Nina does bring a milder than average winter to the southeast, but it also makes the central U.S. “susceptible to Arctic blasts,” he said.