If your NFL team is touted as one of the top Super Bowl contenders before the first aspen leaf begins to turn, would that be enough for you to reserve a hotel room in the Super Bowl city and hunt for tickets to the big game?
Most people wouldn’t, because way too many variables can come into play between now and February. And that’s why meteorologist Joel Gratz, who specializes in Colorado mountain forecasts, puts about as much stock in long-range snow predictions as he does in preseason Super Bowl odds.
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Gratz, founder of a highly regarded ski and snowboard weather forecasting and reporting service called OpenSnow, believes the only forecasts worth betting on are those that predict what will happen five to 10 days out. Anything beyond that, even by highly trained meteorologists with access to sophisticated computer models, is just educated guesswork as far as he is concerned.
“It’s like projecting who’s going to be in the Super Bowl at the start of the season,” Gratz said. “It doesn’t really matter, because you’re going to watch the games anyway, and you’re going to see a lot of surprising things happen. And maybe, a few things that you think could happen will actually come to fruition.”
Nevertheless, we’re a week into September, the Labor Day ski sales are behind us, skiers and snowboarders are starting to dream about powder turns, and two or three ski areas may be making snow a month from now. Or so we can hope.
And there are long-range forecasts to consider. The 90-day forecast by the Climate Prediction Center of the National Weather Service suggests precipitation in Colorado will be below normal and temperatures will be above normal. The Old Farmer’s Almanac says eastern Colorado will be cold and dry this winter, while the western half of the state will be mild and wet.
Then there’s the La Niña effect, a phenomenon in the Pacific Ocean based on surface water temperatures that tends to produce above-normal snowfall north of us when it occurs. Meteorologist Sam Collentine, one of Gratz’s colleagues at OpenSnow, argues that could be good news for Colorado snow riders this winter because a strong La Niña has developed in recent months.
“These are the coolest temperatures we’ve seen in the east-central Pacific for the month of August since 2010,” Collentine said. “That’s telling us there’s a pretty robust La Niña setting up right now, and when we look back at the last significant La Niña event, that was a very healthy snow year — not only for Colorado, but the entire western United States.”
But Collentine concedes long-range forecasts are “rarely accurate,” and Gratz is skeptical. Because La Niña tends to favor the northern U.S. with above-normal precipitation, he believes the impact this winter will be felt in British Columbia, Washington state, northern Idaho, Montana and maybe northwestern Wyoming. Jackson Hole trip, anyone?
“If this is a year when you’re thinking about taking a trip, the Pacific Northwest might be a place to keep your eye on,” Gratz said. “For Colorado, snowfall is just not strongly correlated with El Niño and La Niña. You can tease numbers out and find some correlations here or there, but it’s just not a slam dunk as much as it could be in other places. We’ve had some La Niña seasons that have been fantastic and we’ve had some La Niña seasons that haven’t been so good.
“This is a stronger La Niña, but there’s a bunch of things that have to line up that really aren’t forecastable six months in advance to know if we’re going to have a bunch of snow.”
Gratz has been forecasting Colorado weather for 15 years. Early on, he got interested in studying potential correlations between mountain snowfall and La Niña, thinking he might be able to figure out a way to make reliable seasonal snowfall forecasts. He couldn’t.
“The longer you get into the forecasting game, the more often you see how things can go wrong, or not ‘obey’ your forecast,” Gratz said. “You become a lot more gun-shy about things that you have found don’t have strong correlations. A lot of meteorologists I know are just not super-keen on making long-range predictions. They’re not very accurate. It really just comes down to looking at the weather five to 10 days out and trying to make the call.
“If I thought we could really provide a useful six-month forecast, or three-month forecast, I’d be doing it.”
So how does an avid powder skier like Gratz plan for ski trips? He acts on short-term forecasts like the ones he and other OpenSnow meteorologists make for ski areas across the west and beyond.
“There’s a 100% chance that it’s going to snow this winter, so I’m pretty excited, and I’m ready to go skiing,” Gratz said. “I’m going to chase powder based on 5- to 10-day forecasts. Everything beyond that is speculation.”
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