Time to look forward now as we head into the winter months. I’m Mike Davis, and I’m with Assistant State Climatologist Corey Davis from the State Climate Office of North Carolina. Corey, your office has just come out with its Winter Outlook. Let’s start with where we are right now, and where do you see us going in the next few months?
“Well, Mike, the big story line this fall has been that major flip that our weather has taken from the wet weather back in August and September, including from Hurricane Helene now, to an extremely dry pattern since then, there are parts of the Carolinas that have seen barely even half an inch of rain over the past six weeks. So again, a far cry from where we were just a couple months ago. And at this point we do have moderate drought back on the map in parts of the Carolinas, especially right along the coastline. So that’ll be a big story going into the wintertime as well. Will we break out of that dry pattern, and will some of those drought affected areas start to see rain anytime soon? The other story going into this winter is the La Nina that is emerging out across the Pacific. Sometimes folks wonder why we care about the weather in the Pacific Ocean when we’re almost half a world away from that, but the answer is that those patterns like El Nino or La Nina can actually tell us a lot about what our winter time weather may look like. These patterns can change the way the jet streams set up across the northern hemisphere, and in this case, when we have a La Nina event emerging, that typically means that jet stream will shift to the north, that will put us on the warm side, and also steer a lot of those storm systems away to our north, and when that storm track is not going right over us, we tend to be a little bit drier as well. So again, we’ve been dry over the past month or so, and the outlook with that La Nina emerging is that we will probably be drier overall throughout this coming winter.“