Baby, it'll be cold outside, forecast says
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Apocalypse! Doomsday! Armageddon!
Is a meteor on track to strike Market Square, you ask? Did another Steelers lineman go down? Are parking rates going up again?
Worse.
Brace yourselves, Pittsbrrrghers, brace yourselves.
Winter is coming. And according to the long-range forecast AccuWeather Inc. released Wednesday, it will be half-grim indeed. Below-average temperatures. Above-average precipitation. A cold snap for the holidays -- all of them.
It's enough to make you cry into your eggnog.
One glance at the U.S. map on AccuWeather's news release is truly chilling. The Great Lakes, the Midwest, parts of the northeast and even Western Pennsylvania -- they're all covered by a blue swath.
"BRUTAL WINTER SNOW & COLD" reads the map. But mercifully, that awful designation is saved for the west side of Lake Michigan and those poor suckers in the Dakotas, Illinois, Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Here we'll just be cold -- not brutally, bitterly so, but more than we'd like. Cold like we were in the winters of '07-'08 and '08-'09, AccuWeather meteorologist Steve Travis said from his State College headquarters.
Blame La Nina, that ice-hearted witch. When Mr. Travis' brethren look to the future, they consult tropical events, upper-atmospheric disturbances and equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures.
"The waters in that region are trending toward a La Nina, so those waters are colder than average," Mr. Travis said.
With all the information in hand, the long-range weather wizards perform arcane scientific calculations and consult decades worth of data to see what winters might have corresponding information and thereby set their forecast for the country. It turns out that in this region for comparison's sake, one needn't look back more than three years.
"What that says to us is that for the northeast, for you guys, we are looking at a colder-than-average winter, especially through the early months of the season. So late November through December through about early January is the coldest of the winter," Mr. Travis said.
First Published October 6, 2011 12:00 am
