Clues on coming winter elude experts

PORTLAND — Steve Pierce, a longtime weather watcher who lives in Vancouver, had a big year even by his prodigious standards.

Flooding, heavy snow in the foothills, even a tornado raked Southwest Washington over the past year.

At one point, Pierce was sending so many e-mails before an unusual springtime heat wave that his Internet service provider shut him down. Pierce said the provider cited a cap of 1,000 recipients per day.

“I think they consider that excessive use,” he said.

Pierce may not have cause to be quite so frenetic in the winter ahead, at least according to the rough consensus of a panel of weather prognosticators who gathered Friday in Portland. The Oregon chapter of the American Meteorological Society hosted its 16th annual winter weather forecast before almost 200 people — its largest crowd ever — at the Oregon Museum of Science and Industry.

Last year was dominated by La Niña, characterized by relatively cool equatorial waters off the coast of South America.

The climatological condition generally results in relatively cool and wet wintertime conditions in the Pacific Northwest. Its opposite number, El Niño, generates a much stronger jet stream near the equator — resulting in consistently warmer and drier conditions in the Northwest.

This year falls in the middle, leaving forecasters grasping to discern similar years in the past while applying a mix of art and science to characterize the winter ahead.

“There really is no strong signal this year,” said Steve Todd, meteorologist in charge of the National Weather Service in Portland. “George calls that, ‘extreme cluelessness.’”

Todd referred to George Taylor, the veteran climatologist who retired from Oregon State University earlier this year. For his part, Taylor figures there’s a good possibility of at least one “Pineapple Express” rainstorm from the equatorial Pacific. Historically, those warm and moisture-laden storms tend to be the ones that cause the most flooding, especially if they wash atop lower-elevation snowfall.

Taylor, with concurrence from the other panelists, expects another early and healthy snowpack.

That should be good news for skiers as early as November. When it melts off in the spring and summer, it drives dam turbines, boosts fish migration and satisfies irrigators in the Columbia River basin.

With climate models indicating a weak La Niña could develop in the months ahead, some forecasters say they expect temperature and precipitation to see saw above and below average from month to month. Weather will bounce from cold to warm, wet to dry.

“I expect it to be a roller coaster ride this winter, just like it was last winter,” said Pete Parsons, a former television meteorologist who now works for the Oregon Department of Agriculture.

Pierce, the Vancouver weather observer, said natural processes have fascinated him ever since he watched Mount St. Helens erupt as an 8-year-old in 1980. The former engineer, now a stay-at-home dad, said he figures this will be “an anything-goes type of winter.”

After three years without it, Pierce said, we’re overdue for snow down to the valley floor.

To the big question — snow or no snow — Taylor probably employed as good a model as any when he tossed a coin into the air. The audience waited as Taylor glanced at the quarter and then made the call:

“Heads.”

Erik Robinson: 360-735-4551 or erik.robinson@columbian.com.