The Winter Polar Vortex Hysteria Is Back! (Sigh)

Accuweather's winter forecast: Don't
assume this is a forgone conclusion  

If you read the headlines this week, you could be forgiven for thinking we're all going to freeze to death in the dark amid an incredibly harsh winter coming up.

The headlines are dramatic:  .

Salon's headline screams: "Bad News America: The Polar Vortex Is Coming Back!"

Here's AOL News: "US Winter Forecast: Cold, Snow to Seize Northeast; Wintry Blasts to Slick South."

The occasion for all these doomsday winter headlines was the predictions for the nation's winter weather from AccuWeather, a leading private weather forecasting firm. 

AccuWeather, too, had a scary headline, exactly the same one AOL News used for their online report.

Before you start panicking over the Killer Polar Vortex, don't. It's all hype.

If you delve into the details,  AccuWeather's winter forecast didn't strike me as all that dire.

"The polar vortex, the culprit responsible for several days of below zero temperatures last year, will slip down into the region from time to time, delivering blasts of arctic air.

'I think, primarily we'll see that happening in mid-January into February, but again, it's not going to be the same type of situation we saw last year, not as persistent,' Accuweather.com Expert Long Range Forecaster Paul Pasterlok said."

In other words, the eastern United States is going to get hit by something that happens most winters. Occasionally, the jet stream will carve out a huge southward dip or bulge, which is what many people referred to last winter as the Polar Vortex.

When this southward bulge sags toward the United States, we get a nasty arctic cold snap.

As Pasterlok from AccuWeather pointed out, what made last winter so exceptional and awful wasn't the fact the polar vortex or southward bulge in the jet stream or whatever you want to call it happened.  It just stayed put forever.

Usually, arctic outbreaks come and go pretty quickly. Last winter, the vortex just got stuck, so we never really got much in the way of breaks from the cold. It just kept sending the frigid air from Canada our way from December through March.

If this winter is more typical, we'll get bad cold waves that last a few days, interspersed with periods of more pleasant weather.

I have no idea how this winter will shape up. To be honest, nobody does. Not even AccuWeather, really.

Long range forecasts are notorious for being at least a little off.  That's no slam against Accuweather. It's just the nature of the beast. The science is great at forecasting a day or two out. It's also OK at predicting general trends decades from now, as we keep hearing predictions of a worsening global warming

But forecasting a few months out is dicy.

Another wild card is El Nino, a periodic warming of the eastern Pacific Ocean that seems to be getting under way, at least sort of, right now.  Often, but not always, an El Nino makes winters warmer in North America than they otherwise would be.

Just as a parlor game, though, we can take a look at other forecasts for this winter. NOAA/National Weather Service predicts a warm winter in the western third of the nation and to a lesser extent in New England, and a chilly one in the southeastern United States.

Meanwhile, The Weather Channel and WSI forecast a cold East Coast winter, and one that is not quite as bad as last year in the Great Lakes region.