COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) — Snow put in a brief appearance in time to ring in the New Year, leaving a light coating on grassy surfaces and cars for the first time in two weeks.
The snow drought could end as early as this weekend, when another in a series of storms rolls in off the North Pacific and travels across the Southern states, picking up Gulf of Mexico moisture, before running into moderately cold air over the Ohio Valley Saturday.
Snowflakes have been hard to come by this winter because it’s been too warm. The average temperature in December of 41.8 degrees–more than 7 degrees above normal–tied for fourth place among the warmest Decembers since 1878 in Columbus, though well shy of the recent balmy December in 2015 (44.7 degrees).
So far, this has not been an ideal winter for skiing and snowboarding. Operations at Snow Trails in Mansfield were closed down on Dec. 27 due to persistent warmth and periodic rain, drizzle and fog. Mad River Mountain in Valley Hi, near Bellefontaine, has yet to open this season.
The U.S. had a record low snow extent on Christmas Day 2023 (17.6 percent), based on 20 years of NOAA records, compared to an average of about 37 percent. Last winter, about 50 percent of the country had a white Christmas in the Lower 48 states.
The dreary holiday weather dampened the brightness factor, but travel was far better than a year ago, when a blast of arctic air and 5 inches of snow arrived two days before Christmas, leaving roads packed with snow and ice for days, making travel dangerous.
However, there are finally signs that surges of cold air associated with Alberta clipper systems, like the one that blew through Ohio on New Year’s Eve, will become more frequent in January and February.
The challenge, as snow lovers know all too well, is the linking of cold air with one of the many southern storms coming east from the North Pacific. The tendency has been that cold northern systems and wet southern storms are out-of-phase, but that will likely change in the coming weeks with deeper intrustions of moderately cold air.
Another feature that meteorologists track in mid-winter is the position of the polar vortex high above the North Pole, with a shallow reflection near the surface. Some long-range models hint that the pool of exceptionally cold air may become stretched by a stratospheric warming event, displacing even colder air southward into the Midwest during the latter half of January or early February.
The unseasonable warmth this winter can be attributed to El Niño pattern, possibly one of the strongest on record, with much-above-normal equatorial sea surface temperatures in the central and eastern Pacific Ocean. NOAA scientists expect the cyclical pattern to linger through the winter in the Northern Hemisphere, transitioning to a more neutral tendency in the spring (60 percent likelihood).
A typical El Niño winter features a split jet stream, with a strong component across the southern U.S., bringing frequent storms, while the northern branch carrying cold air is largely deferred to the northern tier of states.
Low-pressure systems in the Pacific tap a steady stream of atmospheric rivers that soak the U.S. Pacific Coast from Seattle to Los Angeles. The eastward movement of these storms across the southern Plains and Gulf states favors heavier-than-normal precipitation as far north as the Mid-Atlantic region.
Generally, drier-than-normal conditions are seen in the Ohio Valley and Great Lakes during much of the winter, though occasionally a large storm turns north, bringing snow or a wintry mix to Ohio and the northern Appalachians.