Dry fall may continue with lack of snow

The gloomy skies over Iowa still don’t signal much snow, and state climatologist Harry Hillaker says we’ll miss the snow that falls in many regions around us this week. He says a few flurries and some sleet has been reported, first Saturday night and a few since then. It’s a change from one year ago about this time. Last year northwestern Iowa had already measured accumulating snow three times during October. And it’s three years since Iowa suffered record snowfalls during a winter that never seemed to end. Often, a major world pattern like “El Nino” signals a certain pattern of weather, but with no such sign this year, forecasters can’t say whether the coming winter will be worse, milder, or average. Hillaker says we will suffer effects from winter’s first advance even far upwind.The Bad news, he says, is that in days to come there may be a lot of snow in the Rockies and Plains states to our north and northwest. Even if we don’t see the white…we’ll feel the cold. Hillaker says it “greases the skids” for cold Canadian air to come our way. But the summer’s drought may persist even into winter, as Hillaker says one year ago we’d already recorded more snowfall than we see today. It was unusually cold as well as snowy a year ago, and just as we’ve had an unusually dry year for rain, we haven’t seen much snow either. Hillaker says longterm forecasts for the coming winter are “remarkably unclear,” something that brings little reassurance to utility customers who hope for a mild winter with heating costs predicted to be sky-high.