If this is winter, then Mother Nature seems to be pulling a real snow job on Chicago.
December is about to end with only 1.5 inches of snowfall–not unusually low, but far less than the 8 inches we had last December.
But don’t pull out your beach gear just yet.
Chicago’s lucky streak of mild weather may run out, National Weather Service meteorologist Amy Seeley said.
“We haven’t been in a pattern for snow here,” Seeley said. “All the snowstorms seem to be missing us and going off to the east. It’s just the way the weather pattern is now.”
To get the type of blizzards that have already pummeled California, Colorado and many cities on the East Coast, certain atmospheric conditions have to occur at the same time, meteorologists say.
Cold air must meet up with a storm track, said Steve Hilberg, director of the Midwestern Regional Climate Center in Champaign.
Most of the big snowstorms that hit Chicago, he said, are caused when a storm system swoops up from Oklahoma into Illinois and collides with cold air from Canada or the Northeast.
“For lake-effect stuff, you need strong northeast winds coming off the lake,” he said.
Hilberg said a cold front is on its way and could bring snow in early January.
“I wouldn’t draw any conclusions from the lack of snow in December,” he said.
Figuring out why the weather patterns haven’t come our way so far is the tough part, says Gidon Eshel, an assistant professor of geophysical sciences at the University of Chicago.
“That’s a much harder question that nobody really can answer with a great degree of confidence,” Eshel said.
“Of course, the natural tendency is to invoke global warming, but it’s probably premature to do that.”
