Long-term outlook...

It's time to take a little longer view of our weather as we get closer to summer. Of course, the first day of summer is still about a month and a half away, but it always seems to come quickly. (As I get older time seems to speed up even more than it used to. Oh well...!)

Now on to the topic at hand:

This winter a relatively strong cooling of the mid-Pacific sea surface temperatures developed, a so-called La Nina. That is the opposite of the more famous El Nino, which we associate with relatively mild winters. The winter produced very pronounced cold weather and snowier than normal totals, much to the chagrin of energy-bill payers here in the Upper Midwest. The trend for colder than average weather continued and April turned out to be the 3rd wettest on record.

May, it seems, has started out on the same path. But will this weather continue or finally lapse into a more normal series of events? The medium and long term computer simulations are predicting a continuation of La Nina in the Pacific into July, so it would seem to follow that the weather patterns will follow the same overall trends for awhile. The wild card here is that the effects of La Nina are typically less pronounced in the Spring season, so hopefully things will gradually shift back toward normal.

If you'd like more in-depth information visit the Climate Prediction Center and get the discussions and graphical outlooks. Their prediction for the next month look like this:

In a nutshell, chances are strong that cooler and wetter than average weather are predicted for the local area.

Dan Breeden
News 19 Chief Meteorologist