Texas Snow wrote:From Steve McCauley:Many of you have commented on hearing about a "polar vortex" and the resulting bitterly cold air moving in during the last days of December or the first couple of days of the new year. Obviously that did not happen. And I am happy to say the Stat Method continues to call for no bitterly cold Arctic Air intrusions for the foreseeable future for us.
When I was driving back from West Virginia, I was listening to an interview with a prominent forecaster who last fall was calling for a bitterly cold and icy winter across much of the country, including our area, reminiscent of the winter of 1977 when freezing temperatures and even snow made it down to Miami!
And though none of this has come true, keep in mind we still have February to get through. But so far, there does not appear to be anything in the data to suggest this will happen .... yet. My palm trees have not even gone dormant this winter!
I'm going to have to respectfully disagree with Mr. McCauley and his faulty logic. These forecasts he refers to about bitter cold impacting us in late December or early January must have been made by amateurs or very poorly skilled meteorologists. The folks I follow have consistently said that the polar vortex disruptions and sudden stratospheric warming event would be slow to transpire and the real weather impacts would take weeks to play out. The message has been consistent from the pros in that any downstream impacts in the CONUS wouldn't happen until mid January or later .... IF they happen. Because these folks also acknowledge that our understanding of these events is still developing.
So, to say that a major pattern change to cold isn't going to occur because some bad forecasts to begin with didn't verify ... well, that is faulty logic in my book. Furthermore, Mr. McCauley does not give us a time frame for when the "prominent forecaster" he heard on the radio or wherever expected the bitterly cold weather. I'm guessing it was probably Joe Bastardi he heard but who knows.