Bread! Milk! TeePee!

We wait all year for this - truly, from March on, I am looking forward to the next winter as if summer isn't even going to happen.  And the good folks at NOAA are doing their part for us snow lovers.  

They say an El Niño will make a mild winter likely in the North and a stormy one in the cards across the South. And...here it is...winter is likely to bring stormy and rainy weather to Florida and the Gulf Coast, below-normal snowfall in the Plains and Great Lakes, drought relief for the Mississippi River valley and the chance of big snowstorms along the Eastern Seaboard*, said the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration forecasters.

* That's us! 

Two major weather machines are at work as we look for the scarves and boots: El Niño is getting stronger, and the oceans are getting warmer. That's all it take to throw weather systems and patterns up in the air.

There is this standard backoff: “Other outcomes are always possible, just less likely,” said Jon Gottschalck, chief of the Climate Prediction Center’s operations prediction branch.

Gottschalck says El Niño is “the predominant climate factor driving the U.S. winter outlook this year. ” But he points out that like any other mischievous child, Niño has been known to act erratically in recent decades.

If you have above-normal ocean temperatures in the Pacific, that changes global weather patterns, and the result is floods, heat waves, droughts, and fires.  

That could lead to more chances for big East Coast snowstorms.  

 Looking back over some of our most notable shovel-breakers, they came during El Niño conditions.  Remember Snowmageddon in February, 2010? El Niño. The big one in January 2016? El Niño sent Pacific moisture across the Southern US, which then headed north up the Atlantic coast, met Arctic air, and there you have it, Katie get the shovel out, Pa, get some rock salt on the drive!

There's no guarantee that you'll be sledding a lot this winter. Just don't say we didn't mention it!