Weather Channel Co-Founder Predicting Snowier, Bitterly Colder Winter Ahead?

he pre-Thanksgiving cold snap and a monster storm forecast to dump five feet of snow on Buffalo, N.Y. Tuesday are just “a preview” of the coming winter, which will be much colder and snowier than normal,  predicts Joseph D’Aleo, co-founder and first director of meteorology at the Weather Channel.

D’Aleo, now chief forecaster atWeatherBell Analytics, was one of the few meteorologists to accurately predict a colder-than-normal November.

He expects several major East Coast snowstorms and “widespread below-zero temperatures” that will plunge much of the nation into a deep freeze for as long as six weeks this winter.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if it snows in Atlanta, Dallas, and Birmingham,” he told CNSNews.com.

“We’ve been talking about this being another one of those historic winters since the spring. The summer before last, we had seen last winter as being one that people near the Great Lakes would remember for a long time, and it turned out to be the coldest December to March on record in Chicago, and the snowiest in Detroit, and top five coldest in many places in the central [part of the U.S.]

“And we saw the same kind of extreme this winter, not exactly in the same place, but another winter that’s going to stress our electric grid and also the energy sources that we have, “D’Aleo told CNSNews.com.

“We were not surprised at the cold coming. We had a cold forecast in November even though all the tools that are used by forecasters to look ahead, even two weeks, right up to the end of October, [were] not seeing the cold. And then suddenly they caught on.

“But we use another approach where we look at all the factors globally: the oceans and the sun and winds in the upper atmosphere over the tropics, and we find years in the past when conditions were most similar. We call it an analog approach. Other people do analogs, too. And it was telling us that it would be a lot like last year in terms of cold. It told us November would be cold, so we were swimming against the strong current.”

D’Aleo noted that the unseasonably cold weather, which is being blamed for17 deaths since Saturday, is just “a preview” of the coming months and years ahead, when he predicts that temperatures will be up to 20 degrees lower than normal.

“And then we think this winter will be another strong one. It may end early in some parts of the country, like the Northeast, but it will be very hard, especially in mid-winter. We’ll get a break after this [current] assault, it may ease a little bit, but we think there’ll be an extended period in mid-winter that will really be harsh all over the nation.”

http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/barbara-hollingsworth/weather-channel-co-founder-predicting-snowier-bitterly-colder