Winter of 51 - 52?

One thing that I always try to do is not to over-hype anything for fear of being disappointed, both myself & anyone listening. The problem is that as I study the research going into the upcoming winter I keep hearing 1951-52 being thrown around, & then I look at the snowfall history graph on my wall for that year & it was the second biggest snow year since 1880.

In 1952 Over 800” fell over Donner Summit. This is the year that the media loves to grab photos from to try & say that it doesn’t snow as much now, which is dead wrong that was just an insane year. That year almost doubled the seasonal average. You may think you want it to snow that much, but I have a picture here on my wall of July 1952 taken on top of Mount Rose Hwy. where the snow banks are still over 20 ft. high. If we were to have a year like that again where would we put all the snow with the increase population? Biggest year since 1952 was 1983 with around 670”, then 1996 in most recent memory with around 600”. I wasn’t here then but I hear stories that even in King’s Beach the roads were impassible for weeks.

The problem the last 3 winters is that it has been too cold to snow. Not only has the earth been cooling but the Pacific down near the equator where the storms feed has been cold. That is not good for breeding storms to feed the jet, plus it tends to form a big ridge over the East Pacific blocking storms from hitting CA. What we need is some warming of the water in the nino region by the equator to get us from the La Nina of the past 3 winters towards El Nino. That isn’t easy to do when the earth is cooling & sunspots are at 100 year lows in activity. But we may catch a break this winter as the ocean currents & wind patterns are starting to warm the water near the equator while the rest of the Pacific remains cold. What forecasters do is take the current weather patterns & try to match them against previous years to find the most similar year, & then see what followed. Here is a recent quote from a long-range forecaster I love to follow & study, Joe Bastardi.

"Let's for instance take this upcoming winter. In the broad backdrop, '51-'52 stands out as the go-to winter. We had the overall reverse of the PDO (there still can be warm episodes) and a cold AMO that was going back to its warm state, as I suspect the AMO will for another five years (the downturn now is temporary and mainly tropical water based, more or less a reaction to what has happened, much like the El Nino developing is), but we were coming off a solar max, not min. The cumulative buildup of bigger areas of cold that take place when there is less sunspot activity is most pronounced as the upturn is occurring, and that puts us close to the '76-'77 winter in the cycle. However, the overall temp of the Earth was as cold as the double cold PDO, cold AMO could have it in the mid-70s, and we are just off the warmest period now. The listing of this is not to draw a conclusion, but to inform the reader, just like I try to do in any aspect, of the fact that what is happening now may mean a lot to what happens later."

So 76-77 was a really dry winter here, but we were reversing from a cold period to warm. Right now we are reversing from warm period to cold. I.E. 1952. So lets not get too excited here in May, but this is something to watch over the summer. As long as we continue to warm the water towards an El Nino state you can only argue that it has to be wetter next winter than the past 3. Let's keep our fingers crossed. BA