Outlook for 2024/25 Winter
It’s the most often asked question at this time of year: what’s the winter going to be like? Seasonal outlooks are what I call “educated guesses”. They’re not just the flip of a coin. There is a lot of science behind them. But their accuracy is only a little better than a coin flip. For winter outlooks, the focus is on whether it is an El Niño, La Niña or neutral conditions in the equatorial waters of the Pacific. There are a lot of other things that come into play, but these are all in the atmosphere. And we currently can only predict the atmosphere out for about two weeks. But the oceans are much slower to react, and so we can make confident forecasts for them several months into the future. Last winter was a great example. It was an El Niño winter, and as expected, this brought mild conditions to the Inland Northwest. Overall. But there was a week of brutal cold in the middle of January. But when you looked at the entire winter, it was warmer than normal. This year, it’s back