Winter weather “predictions”

About a year ago, NOAA's, America's climate prediction center announced that our average winter temperatures might be higher and so would our precipitations.

At the end of the season, we've had the worst early snow season in 45 years (November, December, and January) and ended up the season just under 70% of our normal peak annual snow-pack.

Yesterday, the long-range weather forecast for the winter 2018/2019, claimed that we're on some "El Niño Watch."

The consensus of model data predicts a 70 percent chance of an El Niño developing for the 18/19 ski season.

What this means is that the northwestern portion of our continent will be warmer dryer than normal, so people in Whistler will get a break from shoveling snow.

At the same time, the southeast (mostly New Mexico) will see more precipitations than normal so the folks in Taos Ski Valley will have to stock up snowblowers and snow tires.

As for us, in Park City, we'll have to suffer from only 90% of the normal snow-pack, which obviously is a major progress over last year!

Now, these are just mere promises that aren't worth much, and as usual, we'll need to regroup later to check how true they were...