Good Friday everyone! I promised you a little winter talk and since I am a man of my word… I have some goodies for you to check out.

Before we get to the winter stuff… let’s talk about the chilly air of the past few days. I am very happy with the forecast the blog had last week for this week. We nailed the 30s and frost threat from last week. As is usually the case… we were the lone dog in calling for this. Now I am not going to sit here patting myself on the back. I just want to reinforce the fact that some of our NWS folks continue to get beaten up by mother nature because they can’t issue temps forecasts without copying and pasting what a computer model shows. My personal favorite is to read an extended forecast discussion that talks about using the HPC forecast temps as their own. That would be the same as me coming here on the blog and saying the TWC numbers look good so I am using them as my own forecast. Could you honestly see me using the weather channel’s 7 day forecast as my own? Make your own forecasts people and stop using a worthless set of computer generated numbers that have no shot at being right and your skill scores will go up!

I feel a big rant coming on so let’s get to the winter stuff instead.

We continue to look at loooong range seasonal forecast models. I have shared several of those in the past and I want to show you where they are now. A model known as the CFS is one that is getting more and more attention from forecasters. It updates every few days and had been showing a warm winter up until a few weeks ago when it took a little flip. Here is the month by month breakdown of it’s latest run…

That matches up pretty well with a different seasonal model I posted about a month ago. This model is grouped into 3 month periods that you see at the top of each map…



That model should have a new run out within the next week and I will share that with you. I doubt it will look as cold as the run above as that would be some crazy cold for the entire country. We shall see.

Of importance to us right now is the precipitation forecast. Here is that outlook from the CFS…


Hmmm… that shows above normal precip for us from November through March. Colder than normal with above normal precip! Could it be? Could that actually mean a snowy winter is ahead of us?!!! I guess we will wait and see what the winter forecast thinks. Stop laughing… you will hurt the winter forecast’s feelings! hahaha

BTW… patchy frost will be possible again in the valleys tonight but the weekend looks AWESOME!!!!

More on all that later tonight and Saturday.

Take care.