Warmer Weather Ahead for WNY; Winter outlook

With a warming trend underway, Thursday will be the coolest of the next seven days. Although the colder trend that has persisted for most of this week has bottomed out, there will be another night of widespread frost across the interior on Thursday. Chances are good that if your unprotected plants survived Wednesday night, they will survive Thursday night.

Friday's weather story will be the first in a series of back-to-back simple stories to tell. After a cool start, the atmosphere begins to warm under a huge dome of primordial Canadian high pressure.

Near total sunshine and a light breeze will keep the afternoon high well above average in the upper 50s to mid 60s, following a series of daytime highs in the upper 40s and lower 50s and on Thursday in the mid-50s.

Saturday dawns brightly, the high pressure ridge creeps just a little to the east and brings more of a warming southwesterly flow to our region.

The gentle breeze and full sunshine will push afternoon highs above 60°. In some places inland, temperatures could even exceed 20 degrees.

This weekend foliage conditions will be at or near peak, with some parts of the far southern plains already past their peak. It's time to get out and enjoy the beauty.

Last weekend I promised a nice, warm Sunday for the Bills game. This remains a very confident forecast. Early risers will start the day with a brief morning low in the 40s. But the southwesterly flow will quickly bring temperatures into the 50s to 60s and bright sunshine will return.

The temperature at Buffalo Lake Erie is currently 61, slightly above the average of 59°. But this reading is cool enough to keep the afternoon temperature at 60°, not 70°. The southwest breeze off the lake becomes just strong enough to impact the shooting and passing game. Some peak gusts will reach more than 20 mph, according to the model.

All in all, the day will be considered perfect football weather for most.

The ridge of high pressure hangs hard to the east early next week, and with a weakened pressure gradient off the lake, highs on Monday and Tuesday will reach or exceed the unseasonable 70 degree mark as the dry spell continues.

On Wednesday we will still be on the warmer side of an approaching weak cold front, with daytime highs climbing into the upper 60s.

As the front passes through our region Wednesday evening, there will be some showers that may continue into early Thursday. Behind this weak front, our Thursday highs will return to the seasonal upper 50s. The total precipitation potential of this frontal passage will not be impressive. For those further inland who rely on well water for their needs, this could be a concern.

In the extended area, the Climate Prediction Center assumes that above-average temperatures will prevail over a period of six to ten days. For the period of eight to 14 days, trust is not quite as high.

Even looking into early November, there is no evidence in model ensembles of the return of a western ridge/eastern trough that would bring cold air back to the Great Lakes and eastern US. The upper air flow remains fairly flat – west to east – keeping Arctic air out of most of the lower 48 continental states.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration released its new winter outlook on Thursday. I somewhat agree with the pattern presentation, but not necessarily for the same reasons that underlie his prediction. NOAA expects our region to experience only above-average temperatures in December and February.

Such trends are almost always difficult to detect, and precipitation is even more uncertain than temperatures.

However, the NOAA graphic serves my purposes well, however different my reasoning may be. Let's start by talking about La Nina. Last spring, the two main model groups predicted the onset of La Nina conditions in late summer, which could have reduced Atlantic wind shear and increased tropical cyclone development, among other things. But La Nina has not yet developed, and modeling now suggests a weak La Nina (dominated by cooler tropical waters in the central and eastern Pacific) and one that will be short-lived when it finally takes shape. A more classic and well-defined La Nina often has these effects on cold season trends.

Had a strong La Nina developed, its effects would still be less clearly defined in western New York than in the north-central US, since a strong La Nina has been essentially ruled out (we are still in a neutral state, not in La Nina). or El Nino), the effects of a weak La Nina would be even more difficult to detect in our region.

A few decades ago, Buffalo National Weather Service meteorologist Robert Hamilton found statistical evidence that weak La Niñas, weak El Niños or neutral states often favor colder, snowier winters. That could be because weak trends in ENSO, the El Niño Southern Oscillation, allowed other weather variables to have a greater impact on our winter weather. A negative or cold phase of the so-called North Atlantic Oscillation often favors more wintry weather in our part of the country. So if things were the same today as they were when Hamilton did his research, I would prefer a colder and snowier winter overall.

But an important variable in our climate has accelerated since then, and that variable is concentrated in the high latitudes of the Arctic. As expected, the loss of reflective ice and snow and replacement with dark, absorbing seawater over extended periods has led to significant warming in high latitudes, three to four times faster than average global warming. A major impact of this Arctic warming has been a frequent weakening of the temperature contrast between these high latitudes and our mid-latitudes. This weakening is accompanied by an often weaker polar jet stream and brief, episodic disturbances in the stratospheric and tropospheric polar vortex. Unfortunately, these disruptions cannot be predicted more than a few weeks in advance. However, when they occur and their colder air shifts to lower latitudes, brutal winter outbreaks can occur. This was the case before and during the deadly 2022 Christmas weekend snowstorm and the only very harsh week of January last winter. Both episodes were followed by a rapid and prolonged thaw.

This has been the nature of recent winters here, and I must persist with these general patterns. First, we have vast stores of excess ocean heat that add significant heat to the atmosphere.

And we have ongoing, accelerating warming in the high latitudes.

Based on these two anomalies alone, I have no good reason to favor anything other than an overall milder winter, even if I don't rely on specific models used by NOAA. However, a harsh or even brutal outbreak can still occur for a week or two during an otherwise milder winter, usually associated with a disrupted polar vortex. It may sound counterintuitive, but a strong polar vortex tends to stay closer to the North Pole and trap polar air in the polar region. Conversely, a weak polar vortex can cause the polar jet stream to sink well southward, delivering polar air and snow conditions during a comparatively short episode, as was the case in the two examples I gave.

My conclusion: With so much excess heat in the world's oceans and the Arctic, I expect another milder than average winter overall, but with the possibility of one or two short, episodic, severe winter outbreaks. The latter would be more likely in December or January than in February. Let me remind you that last winter was the warmest on record in the lower 48 degrees, and the winter before that, temperatures in the eastern United States were also well above average. In my opinion, the increasing warming of the global climate needs to be taken into account more than ever as we change our view of winter.