Forecasters butt heads over U.S. winter outlook

Forecasters butt heads over U.S. winter outlook

U.S. forecasters are at odds over how cold and snowy the coming winter will be, with predictions ranging from frigid to mild in the key Northeast and Midwest heating regions.

The murky outlook follows last year's surprisingly balmy winter, the warmest on record, which caught most meteorologists off guard and triggered a free fall in natural gas prices that hurt consumers with locked in supply contracts.

"It looks like another year without consensus," said Matt Rogers, forecaster for EarthSat.

The bone of contention between the weather-watchers this year is the nascent El Nino, a warming trend in the equatorial waters of the Pacific that has been absent for years and can alter weather patterns around the globe.

"Really everything hinges on El Nino, how it develops and how strong it will be," said Mike Palmerino, meteorologist for private forecaster DTN Meteorologix.

Climate scientists from NASA's Goddard Institute said on Monday that Earth may be close to the warmest it has been in the last million years, especially in the equatorial Pacific where El Ninos develop.

For the United States, a strong El Nino typically means warmer winters from the West Coast into the heartland, with cooler weather in the East. But there was little common ground among the five forecasters surveyed by Reuters.

Two said the Midwest, where consumers favor natural gas, would average warmer than normal, two said it would be colder than normal, and one said it would be moderate.

For the Northeast, home to 80 percent of U.S. heating oil demand, three forecasters called for a colder-than-normal winter, one said it would be warmer than normal, and one said it would be moderate.

The warmest forecast came from WSI Corp.

"We have recently seen a rather pronounced cooling of the northern Pacific Ocean that is typically incompatible with an emerging El Nino," said WSI forecaster Todd Crawford.

"Because of this, and based on our objective seasonal models, we now expect the first part of the heating season to be relatively warm in much of the southern and eastern U.S., and cool in the Northwest. This would be a relatively unusual result for an El Nino event, but we feel that the northern Pacific signal will exert more of an influence on U.S. weather patterns, at least through December."

The coldest outlook came from AccuWeather.

"The coming winter is shaping up to be quite different than last year's," AccuWeather said in a release last week. "The El Nino pattern that has noticeably impacted the 2006 hurricane season will lead to colder temperatures for the northeastern U.S. and Midwest, and a milder winter for the West Coast."

EarthSat was somewhere in the middle.

"If the El Nino stays weak, then the colder forecast would have better potential. If it strengthens, we'll go warmer," said EarthSat's Matt Rogers.

The National Weather Service said it expects colder than normal weather in the northern U.S, while DTN Meteorlogix said it would be generally mild in the Midcontinent and colder in the Northeast.