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Cold November 'No Real Signal' of What's to Come

Cold November 'No Real Signal' of What's to Come
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By West Kentucky Star Staff
Nov. 20, 2014 | GRAND RIVERS, KY
By West Kentucky Star Staff Nov. 20, 2014 | 05:08 PM | GRAND RIVERS, KY
WKYX-WNGO meterologist Lew Jetton attended the National Weather Service Winter Weather Workshop in Grand Rivers Thursday to hear from the experts about the cold weather months ahead.

Meteorologists, forecasters, hydrologists, and science officers shared information about what to watch this winter, and how the weather service will share their data. Afterwards, Lew spoke to Science and Operations Officer Pat Spoden, and asked about the earlier-than-usual snowfall, and temperature records that were set earlier this week.

"We just got a real chunk of cold air that moved into our area, and we had the precipitation come in, and it eventually changed over to snow. Once it changed over it didn't take long at all to get it accumulating," Spoden said.

Jetton also posed a question that's been a hot topic for the last year or so - "Polar vortex: myth or fact?" Spoden said, "It is out there, there is a polar vortex, but sometimes it's mislabeled and misused, we'll say that. But it is out there, but it's not the end of the world, put it that way."

While acknowledging that our area has been in a cool weather pattern over the past year, and long-term weather is hard to predict, Jetton asked if there are any indications of what could happen this winter.

"There aren't any good indications. Initially, we thought we were going to have what we call an El Nino, which is a warming of the Pacific waters. When that occurs, that generally pushes the storm systems down along the Gulf Coast, and we don't have too bad of a winter. But now that's not coming in real strong like they thought it was going to, so right now we've got basically a 50-50 chance: you could have a regular winter, you could have a cold winter, you could have a warm winter. There's no real signals out there to say, 'this is for sure.' We did some digging in the records, and even though we had the snow and the cold in November, it doesn't mean that's any predictor of what's going to happen the rest of the winter."

Spoden recently passed his 20-year mark as a member of the National Weather Service office in Paducah.

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