North by Northwestern

Last Feb. 1 at 10:39 p.m., the University cancelled classes due to snow for the first time in over three decades, in the wake of a blizzard some referred to as the snowstorm of the century.

Despite early reports that Snowpocalypse would exact revenge, January’s weather has suggested otherwise. As early as October, Accuweather’s Long-Range Forecasting Team predicted this winter to be worse than the last, with colder temperatures through December and January and multiple snow storms, capping at about 52 inches of snow for the season.

If you’ve been outside at all this past month, it’s pretty clear they got it wrong.

With temperatures this week reaching the upper-50s and low-60s, and January temperatures falling above average as a whole, it seems unlikely that the long-range forecasters’ predictions for the worst winter Chicago has seen in a decade will become reality.

Gary Alan Fine, a professor of sociology at Northwestern and the author of Authors of the Storm: Meteorologists and the Culture of Prediction, says that snow in general is very hard for meteorologists to predict, and that longer-term forecasts are only slightly more accurate than chance.

“Weather is what is going to happen in the next 10 days, while climate is what’s going to happen after that,” Fine says. “When people make these big forecasts, like they say in September that it’s going to be a bad winter, they’re really talking about guesses about climate. So far this is one of those years where climatologists who forecasted that this is going to be a bad winter in Chicago got it wrong.”

WGN-TV/Chicago Tribune meteorologist Steve Kahn says that seasonal forecasting is still in its infancy and it remains difficult to predict an accurate seasonal forecast.

“There are many variables that go into long-range forecasting, and [meteorologists] are using this winter as a learning experience to be very careful when you make forecasts like that,” Kahn says. “For many people this was a very humbling winter.”

Kahn says last year the presence of La Niña and the Greenland block, a large area of high pressure anchored over Greenland, forced cold air down into the United States, causing a cold and snow-heavy winter to hit Chicago. Long-range forecasters used the presence of La Niña this year to predict similar conditions, but overlooked the missing Greenland block.

Mace Bentley, associate professor of meteorology at Northern Illinois University, says that the lack of arctic air seeping in the U.S. this year has prevented the development of blizzards or other large storms.

“Given the current trends, it is likely that we will not see below normal temperatures and/or significant snow for the foreseeable future,” Bentley said in an e-mail message. “However, given that we have about one month of meteorological winter to go, the pattern can always break down over the next two weeks and change to a more favorable winter-time situation.”

But Kahn says that although we’ll probably get some cold weather, he doesn’t think this winter will come close to last winter as far as intensity.

“I don’t think we’re going to have anything long-lasting and mind-shattering like we’ve had in the past,” Kahn says. “The last few winters have been quite cold and snowy and I think this is a nice break for people. It’ll give us a little relief and we’ll see what happens next year.”