This past season in California looked more Death Valley (above) than what we might hope for at Mammoth or Tahoe. Photo: Gary C. Tognoni
Another article about the weather… I know, real original. I recently saw a photo of a “trend board” posted by the foremost antagonistic snowboard site, YoBeat, and right there smack dab in the lower left corner scribed in orange dry erase marker was “talking about this shitty winter.” It certainly is a popular topic right now and if you’re one of the many skiers or snowboarders who has sworn off any talk of the recent winters that never were, then good for you and keep on going — this article will be here the next time a powder-filled daydream knocks you off your feet and leaves you longing for the waist deep days of old. For the rest of us who are equally bummed about the lack of snow in recent years but are trying to find some explanation for this drought please don’t be afraid, this article (unlike many that have been appearing in the media recently) will not leave you wallowing with despair for fear that the waist deep powder might be a thing of the past.
Some recent articles have presented what at first appears to be a researched and educated approach to the snowless winter on the West Coast and the now four-year drought in California. But these articles all seem to have two shortcomings in common: first, they all see this fourth consecutive year as a sign that things have changed and tell readers, as Jerry Brown recently told Californians, that this is the “new normal,” that “the idea of your nice little green grass getting water every day, that’s going to be a thing of the past”; the other traits these articles share is that the authors all include the disclaimer that goes something like “I’m no meteorologist” or “I’ll be the first to tell you I’m not a weather expert.” Yet despite this admitted lack of knowledge on the subject matter, these authors do little more than present pre-determined opinions supported by cherry picked data. Forget confirmation bias; this is straight-up fear mongering, or the modern interpretation of fear mongering — click bait.
I don’t mean to be a dick, but the more articles I come across proselytizing the end of winters in California, the more I feel obligated to find out what’s actually up with this weird weather.
These days whenever I think about the past four seasons and the deep snow that once was (all the way back in 2011) there is a little voice echoing in the back of my skull that occasionally whispers an ominous what if? What if this is, in fact, the “new normal?” In the same way most people are worried about the drought for typical, well, drought purposes like agriculture and drinking water, I am first and foremost concerned with how much snow we should expect in the actionable months. To be frank, what I really want to know is: should I up and leave because this West Coast well is tapped? Pretty simple minded and a very poor self-preservation strategy… but hey — priorities.
To come to grips with my anxiety, I got in touch with Bryan Allegretto. Better known as B.A, he is a weather blogger in Lake Tahoe, California. He has garnered quite the reputation for making big calls on snow storms that national weather outlets including NOAA don’t predict. Most notably, B.A. went out on a limb in the fall of 2010 calling for 150% of average snowfall based on historical seasons analogged against what he was seeing. It was a very liberal prediction and few members of the weather reporting community were willing to make such a call so early in a season — especially when living in a place where that much snow has tremendous economic implications (forget about how rad the shredding is). That 2011 winter it ended up snowing 810 inches, nearly twice the average at Squaw Valley.
Base camp for B.A. is beautiful, but this is not necessarily the sight you want to see in January…
Today, B.A. runs his blog through OpenSnow.com, a website that features regional weather experts who report on weather specific to the mountains and towns of those regions, even going so far as to predict snowfall totals at specific elevations throughout a storm. This proves to be very useful in warm winters when elevation matters even more and provides a level of specificity that you won’t get from a larger, national weather outlet.
“They know me over at the local NWS office,” explains B.A. as we spoke on the phone — he had just arrived in South Lake, where he works full-time in the Hotel Management Industry. “I’ll call up to give a snowfall report and sometimes the person who answers will say ‘hey B.A.’ and they look at what I’m producing and predicting. We don’t always predict the same weather, a lot of the increased popularity of my blog was due to me beating them out on a couple big storms, but sometimes I’m wrong and they get it right,”
I wanted to know, in no uncertain terms, if there is any legitimacy to that disturbing, haunting whisper in the back of my mind — the “what if?” I wanted to know if these past four winters were global warming in effect? It doesn’t go from bottomless blower to just bottom because Al Gore says so… does it?
“Something different is going on here for sure,” B.A. confirmed. “Is the climate changing? Sure. But flipping to a snowless pattern forever in four years? That’s way too fast. Way too fast to say, ‘Well, 2010-2011 was a record breaking year but then global warming happened.’ Global warming is something that is going to happen over 30 or 40 years. It’s not going to happen immediately.”
That’s what I thought, and, deep down, what I felt. It all just seems a but sudden and a bit too, a-hem, “Inconvenient” (to borrow the lead talking point from the former Vice President). But those past four winters in California and past two in the Pacific Northwest weren’t even predicted by the most popular climate model predictions that came out of the An Inconvenient Truth era. In fact, of everything they predicted only one of those predictions came true.
“The climate models I saw back then said it was going to be warmer and wetter and that we were going to see increased hurricanes,” says B.A., “but we are about to set a record for seven years without a major hurricane hitting the US and tornado activity (which was supposed to drastically increase) is way below normal. It’s dry in California but we just had icebergs washing up on the beach and the ocean freezing over for the first time in 80 years in Massachusetts. So things are changing but sometimes it seems to be the opposite of what was originally predicted.”
That’s fine though because no one claims to be able to predict the weather. Sure B.A. and his colleagues are snipers when it comes to the short range forecast, but anything more than a week out is really just some smart guessing. Even NOAA won’t get specific with predictions more than five days out. The thing of it is, meteorologists really can’t predict the weather; in fact, nobody can, at least not long term. The reason for this is that we cannot predict the ocean currents and ocean temperatures and those two elements despite what you may hear elsewhere are leading factors that determine the weather.
“You need to run different experiments and base your answers on the results,” explains B.A. “I think a lot of people, that probably don’t know the science and even some out there who do, already know the answer they are trying to come up with before they do the experiment. It’s like, go back to science class in 8th grade, you have to not know what answer you’re trying to come up with. I want to be like wait, slow down, and hold on a minute, yes global warming is a part of it, yes this is really weird that we had no La Nina or El Nino for four years. The ocean has been really warm off the coast the past two years which creates high pressure if there are no other signals to override it like an El Nino—so it’s normal to have dry years. You go back 100 years, when you have positive PDO and no El Nino or La Nina conditions you tend get dry years along the West Coast so yeah it makes sense. The anomaly of it for me is there were two years of ENSO neutral conditions along the equator with cold water along the West Coast, and then two years of ENSO neutral with warm water along the West Coast and neither favor wet conditions for California.”
This is where I started to lose it. Too much jargon makes me go cross eyed; luckily B.A. is a good teacher and pointed me towards some invaluable resources to further my education on the specifics of weather. Here is the shorthand version that should get you through the rest of this piece with a decent understanding of what’s going on.
Image: Wikipedia
First, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is the most important aspect to consider, it is a pattern of variability of the Sea Surface Temperatures that occurs in the North Pacific and has phases that seem to last between 20 and 30 years. The Atlantic Multi Decadal Oscillation (AMO) is a similar type of pattern occurring in the Atlantic Ocean. These “decadal oscillations” are typically deemed warm or cold overall for the duration of the 20 to 30 year stage. However, within each oscillation pattern there can be a stretch of consecutive years that deviate from the larger, decadal trend.
The thought is that we are in a cold PDO phase overall, but the last two seasons we have switched to a positive phase with warm water along the West Coast that could be to blame for the constant high pressure ridge we saw during the winter. This recent four year dry stretch is not abnormal for California. In the 1930s there was an eight year drought, but obviously California didn’t dry up back then either.
The ENSO (El Nino Southern Oscillation) is a “see-saw pattern of surface pressures and ocean temperatures that occurs in the tropical Pacific Ocean along the equator.” The warm phase is known as El Nino and the cold phase is called La Nina. Depending on the strength and phase of ENSO it can determine the jet stream pattern over North America and the Pacific which will ultimately determine how storms track during the winter. El Nino conditions tend to occur more often with warmer water in the north pacific associated with a positive PDO phase. An El Nino pattern typically means less snowfall for the PNW and a fifty-fifty chance for wet conditions in central California as it happens to be in the boarder region between where it will be wetter over Southern California, and where it will be drier over the Pacific Northwest. La Nina conditions tend to occur more often when there is colder water in the North Pacific associated with a negative PDO phase. As we learned in the shovel breaking, powder-feasting winter of 2011, colder water off the coast can mean more precipitation and if it’s a strong La Nina (a.k.a. Super La Nina) it can mean a boat load of snow too.
Image: University of California Berkeley
Over the past four years, neither of these conditions — El Nino or La Nina — have taken hold with any significance. Since the last Super La Nina four years ago, there has only been, at best, one weak El Nino, but most meteorologists agree that there has been no specific pattern at all. El Nino and La Nina are not something you can set your watch to and wait, in fact as much as these dominate patterns affect the weather, the weather also affects the patterns. Typhoons in the Pacific can move around a ton of warm water and are just one example of how something like a tropical storm or tsunami which displace and replace huge amounts of water of different temperatures, can play a role in determining the weather patterns in the mountains on the western coast of the United States.
“With the overall PDO phase what we see over thirty year periods is that it will be in a warm phase about 80 percent of time and cold phase for 20 percent of the time for thirty years and then it will switch to a cold phase about 80 percent of the time and warm phase 20 percent,” continues B.A. “And within these cycles what we are noticing is that during the twenty- to thirty-year period where the water off the coast is mostly warm we tend to have a higher occurrence of El Ninos and in the twenty to thirty year periods that are mostly cold off of the coast there is a higher occurrence of La Ninas. So what a lot of experts think is that right now we are seven or eight years into a twenty or thirty year cold Pacific cycle so we should see this slip back to the cold PDO pattern in the next year or two and cold water off the coast should be the general trend for the next 15 years or so.
“If the oscillation theory is correct and the pattern holds, more cold water off the coast will mean more La Ninas than El Ninos over the next fifteen years. The cold water off the coast tends to create low pressure instead of high pressure over the West Coast during the winter. Next winter we may see an El Nino develop, but we will take it because if we have ENSO neutral again with the warm water that is sitting off the coast we will most likely have another Winter with high pressure stuck over the West Coast and dry conditions.”
GIF: NOAA
The problem is that “if” as in “if the pattern holds…” We have only been recording this weather data for about 100 years, or three cycles in the cases of PDO and AMO. We do the best we can with the data we have but the earth is millions of years old and the data set just isn’t big enough and that goes for everybody, climatologists included. Everything we know about weather as fact is just too little to extrapolate any meaningful predictions.
“To some people 100 years of data might seem like a lot but when you have ocean cycles that run in 30 year cycles and you have three cycles in 100 years that’s it, just three sets of data for what the ocean does — warm, cold, warm — and then you’re done,” says B.A. “And that is only looking at the sea surface temperatures and not the other oscillations and teleconnections that can affect the pattern.”
That’s why these past four years in California have been so vexing because while they are not an anomaly in terms of drought and temperature, there are a couple aspects that make this particular drought unique. First, 2012 and 2013 (the first two years of the drought) were caused by different reasons then the most recent years 2014 and now 2015. And what is particularly odd about this most recent winter in 2015 is that precipitation was not that far below average.
The drastic change from one year to the next is tremendous.
“In February, we were ahead of normal precipitation in the Northern Sierra,” says B.A. “And in a significant measurement done annually in March, it was found that the Northern Sierra Mountains were at 70 percent of normal precipitation and 20 percent of snowpack, that is strange. But to say that global warming is the only culprit is just not based on all of the science we know.”
It’s a tough topic to debate. On one hand you have these otherwise credible climatologists saying I told you so (even though they didn’t); and on the other hand you have the meteorologists are looking at the data and not feeling any urge to sound the climate change alarms. But when you live in California — and as the most populous state in the Union, A LOT of you live in California — your livelihood, especially come fire season, has everything to do with what’s happening right now. Good luck trying to explain that this is not just global warming.
Bryan Allegretto: “A lot of being made of the California drought, which is as bad as any we have seen in modern times, but is amplified by a news media( and others) hungry to spread a missive of mayhem that refuses to acknowledge similar set ups and responses in the weather and climate to what we see now. Nothing is ever exactly alike, but once again, after taking a break after November, the enso couplet of the late 1970s is coming front and center.”
Bryan Allegretto: “Now look at the evolution of the CFSV2 over the next eight months. It may not be exactly been there, done that, but it certainly is something that if one looks back and has the right analog tool, can find the linkage in the patterns and be confident of normal to above normal precip over the next year across the southern tier of the US, and especially the southwest and southern plains.”
“A lot of meteorologist say, ‘Is global warming a player on the field?’ YES, but it’s the right fielder — it’s not the pitcher, it’s not controlling the game, just contributing to it,” B.A. explains. “It’s dry this year, global warming may have made it a little drier and warmer, that’s all I would say. Global warming does not override major signals that control weather patterns, but again I’m not a climatologist.”
And there we go, the classic disclaimer this time from an expert. So one area of expertise is not quite enough. Even if B.A. were a climatologist, he would still have to defer to an oceanographer who specializes in ocean currents and ocean temperatures, both of which cannot be predicted with any reasonable accuracy. So, in sum: you can’t predict the weather, at least not in the same scientific way you can predict gravity or a chemical reaction.
With such a young field of study there will be more and more anomalies that arise as meteorologists continue to build the data sets, but forecasters like B.A. use historical weather data with great accuracy to predict weather seasons in advance. Through lining up historically similar scenarios and looking at the previous outcomes of those seasons they are able to predict with some certainty what this spring will be like or even what hurricane season might entail: “For this winter I looked at other winters with similar patterns. Typically in years like this with a weak ENSO (El Nino) we have most of our snow at the beginning and end of the season. That is what I predicted back in the fall and that is what happened. Things can change, a typhoon or Kelvin wave can push a lot of water around an totally flip it, the sun also has a major effect on the weather, there are many factors that are beyond our prediction but generally we can come up with a good guess.”
Mainstream media hype has given one story, the story of global warming and THE END IS NIGH, as the unequivocal consensus between all scientists when many are still researching the facts. Photo: Eddie J. Rodriquez
No good story about something as meaningful as the weather is without controversy. I learned that there is a riff between some renowned meteorologists and the mainstream media which apparently has the majority of climatologists in its back pocket.
“Meteorologists avoid getting in trouble because they only claim to predict the weather for the next season,” B.A. points out. “So when they are accused of crediting the oceans with controlling the weather they can always say yeah but just for this season — wipe the sweat from their brow — and go back to focusing on the day to day. But there are a lot of guys out there, experts, who will tell you that oceans have way more to do with weather patterns than CO2 but they can only say that in blogs that nobody reads so they don’t get in trouble and risk their career.”
There is a great deal of pressure to promote the notion of human-induced climate change as the only responsible party for the outcome of the day to day weather but the science that backs this up just doesn’t exist. Climate change is credited with a .6 degree rise in global temperatures, but if you check the weather data the average temp through out the winter in most mountain towns isn’t consistently above average by that amount. They can be significantly above or below average year to year based on other factors that truly control the weather patterns.
“Meteorologists pretty much accept the oscillation theories hands down but climatologists steer away from them because they can’t give credence to the fact that oceans and other factors are controlling the weather because then they would have to say that humans aren’t controlling the weather and they would get ridiculed or fired or lose their government funding.”
This is a big deal, and while it came up as side note in my conversation with B.A. it is likely that our generations perception of weather and climate may be somewhat skewed by popular predictions that did little to educate us on how weather actually works. It was not my focus nor my intention to stir the pot in this regard when starting this piece however the topic seems unavoidable when talking to a meteorologist about something like global warming.
“No one can deny the earth has been warming a little bit,” says B.A. “.6 degree’s fahrenheit over the past 25 years. It’s real, it’s happening, something is changing but it’s happening very, very slowly and it could be affecting the pattern but people around town right now are saying it’s never going to snow again and they are serious when they say it. But that’s insane — it will snow again, I can promise you that. We should be good stewards but we shouldn’t worry that it’s never going to snow again.”
Let’s be clear, nobody is denying that climate change is real. It is. But to say its evil sister global warming is the only thing responsible for the recent years of low snow in the Sierras and now the Pacific Northwest just is not based on any repeatable scientific experiment. And we should all be good stewards and B.A. echo’s this sentiment emphatically, there are myriads of reasons why weening off of fossil fuels is a good choice and there are many preferable alternatives to how most populated communities receive the power to their homes. Let’s not go there now, let’s keep it about the weather and what little we do know and pay more attention to things that are actually affecting the weather.
And please, please, please hit me up if you are tracking the PDO and it starts to shift back to a cold phase with a La Nina — my sticks could really use some wax. In the meantime, be good stewards, and don’t fret — snow is on the way.
What dreams may come.
