WNKY News 40 Weather Report: NOAA Winter Weather Outlook

What A La Nina Winter Could Look Like in Our Area

BOWLING GREEN, Ky.- December is the start of meteorological winter. What can we expect for the upcoming season? Experts at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released a new forecast for the winter months ahead.

With conditions leaning more favorable to La Nina. Climate Prediction center forecaster Matthew Rosencrans expects an active winter season.

” La Nina winters can have some pretty strong  gradients across them. For the, for the Midwest, western half, can kind of be out towards Illinois and kind of be kind of you can get some dry spells. Illinois. Kind of Iowa. As you go further east, kind of south of the Great Lakes, down into Kentucky and even into the western slopes of the Appalachians. You can get some late season later, January, February. You can turn to be quite wet, with some quite impactful snowfalls in the higher terrain.” – Matthew Rosencrans

With a typical La Nina setup in the wintertime, you have a blocking high pressure system in the Pacific and a Pacific jet stream that ushers in moisture. Now, generally with this setup, we have a wave of energy that travels from northwest to southeast. And what this can do is this can actually give us numerous chances of seeing systems roll through.

Now, does that mean that we could see a lot of snow? Not necessarily, but it does mean that we do have several chances of seeing a lot of systems rolling through our area, especially for your winter time season.

“You’ll  tend to get more of those preferentially during La Nina winters. And there is kind of a defined peak really at that real late January. But really February and into March, you can kind of see that pattern turn on many of the years. So that’s why we favored above normal precipitation for that area for December, January, February, but even more so January, February, March.” -Rosencrans