El Niño may bury states that rarely see snow
The Pacific Ocean has decided to make this winter everyone's problem. A monster El Niño is building off the equator, and NOAA's forecasters have spent all summer revising their numbers upward like a bartender watching you order.
The Climate Prediction Center now gives a better than 90% chance of a "very strong" event this fall and winter — and a 69% chance that October through December beats every El Niño on record back to 1950. Meaning: the strongest one your grandparents ever lived through, potentially outdone.
Who gets the weird winter
The classic El Niño move is shoving the storm track south, and this one is shaping up textbook. The wet signal is parked over the southern tier — strongest across the Southeast, where the odds of above-normal precipitation clear 60 percent, running up almost the whole East Coast.
Which brings us to the fun part: that's precisely the part of the country that treats one inch of frozen anything as a biblical event. When near-freezing temps meet a firehose of Gulf moisture, you don't always get postcard snow — you get ice storms, the Southeast's personal horsemen, arriving in states where the entire snow-removal fleet is three guys named Earl.
Meanwhile the actual powder jackpot, per OpenSnow's winter preview, sits over the Southwest and southern Rockies:
- California's Central Sierra carries the clearest above-normal snow signal in the country;
- Utah, Arizona and New Mexico — yes, Arizona — all lean snowy;
- Southern and eastern Colorado join the party, while Washington's Cascades run warm and watch their storms fall as rain.
Before you argue with the map
NOAA would like everyone to breathe. As National Weather Service director Ken Graham put it, every El Niño is different — each one is "unique with its own imprint on our weather." A stronger event raises the odds of the classic pattern; it signs no contracts.
More storms is not the same as more snow. Where it runs too warm, the sky just sends rain — and where it's cold enough, the sky sends everything.
So: if you're in Tucson, maybe locate a scraper. If you're in Atlanta, I love you, please buy bread now and avoid the highway in January. And if you're in Tahoe — congratulations, you smug, powdered creatures.
Previously we wrote: Which true story is By Any Means based on? Greg Scarpa's Mississippi episode circulated as mob lore
