Freeze Watch is just the beginning

Clouds ahead of cold front, Hadley MA (today, 10/18/14)

For those of you loving the warm up this past week, prepare for a rude awakening (literally, on Monday) – a Freeze Watch is in effect for much of interior Southern New England for late Sunday into Monday morning at 9 am. This isn’t a case of frost, mind you, but FREEZE. Minimum temperatures will be in the upper 20s and low 30s, and a newspaper canopy over your plants may not do the trick this time around. These sub-freezing temperatures tend to kill crops and other sensitive vegetation.

Meanwhile, as you have no doubt noticed, local talk has started to drift into musings on winter. What kind will we have? Mild or bitter cold, snowy or icy, and what will happen to Pine Street when deep freeze sets in? Indeed, the sorry state of Pine Street has practically displaced weather talk these days, and this being New England and all, that’s saying something.  Pine Street aside, forecasters from the Farmer’s Almanac to bona fide meteorologists (oops, did I betray a bias there?!) have been rolling out their predictions (Almanac) and forecasts (meteorologists) for the coming winter. 

The fun of the Farmer’s Almanac is the specificity of their predictions, right down to providing a summary for our own Amherst Center. So if you put any stock in what the Almanac has to say (or even if you don’t and are just curious), here’s their winter forecast for Amherst Center:

Winter will be much colder than normal, with near-normal precipitation and below-normal snowfall. The coldest periods will be in mid- and late December, early and mid-January, and mid- to late February. The snowiest periods will be in mid- to late November, mid- and late December, and early to mid-March.  (Farmer’s Almanac, 2014)

To be honest, that’s pretty typical for a lot of winters around here, except for the “near-normal precipitation and below-normal snowfall.” Last I checked, precipitation included snowfall.

It probably won’t surprise you to hear that meteorologists have their own take on matters, and while they are predicting a somewhat colder and snowier winter than normal for the Northeast, they don’t expect the record-breaking misery of last winter.  Cold air will surge into the Northeast in late November, but the brunt of the season should hold off until January and February (much as it did last year, as you may recall). And who can forget last winter’s “polar vortex,” which brought extended bouts of arctic temperatures?  We’ll see a few blasts like that again this year, but temperatures are not expected to stay so persistently sub-zero. So, take heart – winter is coming one way of another, just like you knew it would.

As for Pine Street lasting the winter (or even the next month), that’s another matter altogether.