Good Monday afternoon gang. I am dropping in for a quick update on how we finished up the month of October and to take a little peak into the future. We will use the numbers from October to see if they tell us anything about what the future may hold.

Before all that… a quick word about the weather for the rest of this week. Below normal temps will continue with upper 40s to low 50s coming up for Tuesday and Wednesday. The coldest air comes for Thursday and Friday as the 40s rule. This will be a blustery time with the threat for a few showers. The weekend looks much better with some Indian Summer coming next week.

How about the rest of the month? Well… let’s take a look back at October to see if it can give us come clues.

Let’s use the city of Lexington as a reference.

The average temp for Lexington for October was 53.1 degrees. This gave us the 11th coldest October on record and the warm last few days of the month kept this number from being much higher on the list. I put all the years that ranked ahead of this year into the mixing bowl and this is how the average following November temp pattern came out…




As u can see… that is pretty close to normal around here and it is something I agree with.

My take on November is that we have a back and forth pattern for much of the month which should keep our average temp very close to normal. The wild card will be the last 10 days of the month as some of the data I have been looking at in recent weeks suggest a wintry period may come calling in time for Thanksgiving week. If that does indeed happen… the month would then skew colder than normal.

I see precip averaging normal to above once again as our active pattern continues with a strong southern branch of the jet stream.

By the way… October 2009 in Lexington came in as the 8th wettest on record. Here is an amazing stat for you… 5 years from the this decade are now in the top 10 wettest October’s on record for Lexington. 2002, 2004, 2006 and 2007 are also on there. That’s pretty amazing.

Back to the October temp pattern. I showed you a map earlier about how the average November looked after some of Lexington’s coldest Octobers on record. How did the following winters turn out? Ask and ye shall receive…



If you have been reading the blog all summer… you will notice we have done several “fast forwards” based on actual weather data from a specific time. We did something similar with the numbers from our record cold back in June and it also showed a cold winter was likely to follow. I have yet to one of these fast forward looks, on the blog or on my own, that showed anything but a cold winter coming up. I have thrown you guys enough bones over the past several months about where I am going with the forecast for the winter and nothing has changed in my mind. I just have to come up with all the numbers and put it all together for you.   I have been looking at a lot of winter thoughts from others out there and I see most of them talking about 1976 as an analog year. Regular readers will notice this year has been thrown around by me as a good match to this year as far back as this past spring and early Summer. But, it’s good to see others jumping on some of the thoughts we have had out for a long while now.

I will have a full update later tonight so check back. Have a great rest of your day and take care.