A Flurry of Predictions on Rain
The outlook was, well, hazy on Monday as 2,000 weather forecasters converging on Long Beach for their annual convention found themselves unable to predict when El Nino is coming -- or even agree if it’s going to rain today.
“I didn’t bring an umbrella. I knew there hadn’t been any rain out here for awhile, so I wasn’t expecting any,” said Marshall Shepherd, a research meteorologist at the National Aeronautical and Space Administration in Maryland. “I came for the sunshine.”
Shepherd was gazing at a gray overcast sky above the Long Beach Convention Center, where the American Meteorological Society is meeting through Thursday. When pressed, he predicted rain will fall Wednesday evening.
El Nino is the warming of surface water in the equatorial Pacific that causes high-altitude jet-stream winds to drift south. How El Nino is shaping U.S. weather patterns this year is a major topic of discussion at the convention of climatologists and atmospheric scientists.
Other topics, which have attracted academics and a variety of public and private-sector forecasters (except for TV weather forecasters, who have stayed home because this is television’s “sweeps week”) include new tornado F-scale damage assessment guidelines, the variability of the water cycle and hurricane forecasting.
But what about those predictions in December that Los Angeles was in for a wetter-than-normal winter? The forecasts that were followed by a rainless January that was the warmest in local history?
“Meteorology in general is a very inexact science,” said weatherman Paul Wahner, who helps with Air Force forecasts at Cape Canaveral, Fla. Wahner was packing a raincoat in his briefcase. He was predicting rain late Monday night or early this morning.
Barbara Mayes, a National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration/National Weather Service meteorologist, called for rain to begin falling at 3 p.m. today. She said she was prepared with a hooded jacket she brought with her from Bellefonte, Pa. “El Nino is still out there,” she said, gazing toward the Pacific. “Ocean temperatures are still elevated. A system’s coming.”
Forecaster Bruce Telfeyan, who works with the Air Force, toted an umbrella with him from Omaha. He pegged the rain’s arrival at late tonight. And he pronounced Monday’s murky, overcast weather as a “gorgeous change of pace for me.”
Same for Damon Grabow, a graduate student in atmospheric science at the University of North Dakota. He said he was tempted to take scissors to his long pants when he arrived in Long Beach from Grand Forks, where it was 25 degrees below zero the other night.
Weather forecasting “is not ESP,” Grabow said, declining to refine his own prediction for rain in Los Angeles beyond a rather loose “sometime this week.”
Rain on Wednesday was predicted by Ian Okabe, a former Canadian government weather forecaster who is now a university professor in Vancouver, British Columbia. El Nino has already arrived there, with unseasonably warm and sunny winter weather, he said.
While there are differences of opinion about how much rain El Nino will bring this year, Los Angeles shouldn’t count the weather phenomenon out yet, said convention-goer Jim Laver of Camp Springs, Md.
Laver is director of the federal Climate Prediction Center, and has been watching rain head for Los Angeles for the last week and a half, even as experts have acknowledged that the current El Nino effect seems to be declining.
“I think we’ll see showers Tuesday afternoon and evening and stronger rain on Wednesday,” he said. “El Nino may be a contributing factor to this.”
As for the “official” weather forecast for Los Angeles, the National Weather Service on Monday predicted a 50% likelihood of rain tonight with a 70% chance Wednesday and Thursday.
In other words, expect flurries of umbrellas outside the meteorological society meeting as the forecasting front moves out.
