NOAA Releases Winter Outlook – Snow in Louisiana? Really?

If you live along Louisiana's coastline you're still not quite done with hurricane season yet. From Grand Isle to Morgan City across to Rutherford Beach, Creole, and Cameron, they're keeping a close eye on Tropical Storm Oscar located near Cuba this morning.

The good news on Oscar is it appears as though our cold front that came through last week will have enough of a push to send that tropical system back out to sea and away from the Gulf of Mexico.

As you can see from the graphic below, the Atlantic Hurricane Season is winding down. We're officially past the "second peak" of the season in October.

If memory serves me correctly no named storms have ever made landfall in Louisiana in November. So, if we can hang on just ten more days we'll have history on our side.

Once forecasters stop watching the tropics in Louisiana they start looking the other way, you know to the north to see what kind of Alberta Clippers or Blue Northers we can expect as we move into the winter months. The folks who create those forecasts are the meteorologists at the Climate Prediction Center. Their mission is to monitor weather and climate and compile data on current atmospheric and oceanic conditions.

It's the CPC that gives us the long-range outlooks and the seasonal outlooks and they have just released their first forecast for what we in Louisiana will call winter. The seasonal outlook covers December, January, and February. The first outlook we will examine is the precipitation outlook.

Based on that graphic forecasters predict the dry conditions that we are currently experiencing throughout Louisiana will continue. Winters across Louisiana are usually drier than spring and summer around the state. However, when it comes to winter precipitation it only takes a little to cause a lot of trouble. But based on this outlook there doesn't appear to be a "significant" threat on the horizon.

But naturally, whether precipitation is just rain or becomes a real "pain" has to do with the temperature. Louisiana does get temperatures that fall below freezing during the winter months. When that happens and precipitation falls we generally have to shut things down until things thaw out. So, let's look at the temperature forecast for the upcoming winter months.

As you can see the orange shading doesn't bode well for cooler than average temperatures. So perhaps the concept of snow or frozen precipitation might not be in the cards for the I-10 corridor this winter. It does look a bit more promising along the I-20 corridor but even there I would hold my breath that school will be dismissed because of winter weather between now and Mardi Gras.

We should note the Old Farmer's Almanac has weighed in on the issue and they are calling for an unusual cold spell for Louisiana in late November and also another spate of colder weather from late January into early February. I would say if we're going to see snow in Louisiana, that's when we would see it.