Published: November 24, 2007 11:59 pm      

Weather experts predict a warmer than normal winter

With the price of a barrel of crude oil at an all-time high, homeowners look at the moderate temperatures of the past month with crossed fingers, hoping they will continue.

And if experts are correct – be they forecasters from The Old Farmer’s Almanac, the National Weather Service or local weather forecaster George Acker – temperatures will stay slightly higher than normal.

“In a nutshell, it looks like it’s going to be on the warmer side,” said Bruce Budd a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in State College.

“Precipitation-wise, it looks like normal winter weather.”

It’s all about La Nina, weather in the Pacific Ocean determining temperatures and wind patterns that ultimately impact the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley.

While not to a tremendous degree, winds thousands of miles away in this naturally occurring climate cycle ultimately impact weather in Cambria and Somerset counties.

“The Johnstown area has a greater than 40 percent chance it will be warmer than normal. That’s a pretty good chance it will be warmer than normal,” Budd said of predictions from December to February.

Warmer could mean a degree or two or several degrees higher than normal.

The editors of the Almanac – where weather predictions have been cranked out for more than 200 years – place Cambria and Somerset counties in the Appalachians, adjacent to the Ohio Valley and one of 16 weather regions nationwide.

Almanac predictors say winter will be one to two degrees above normal.

The prediction of specially mild temperatures for November already have proven mostly accurate.

Precipitation for the region will be near normal, with the exception of midwinter when snowfall will be above normal.

Longtime weather forecaster George Acker, a retired farmer from Martinsburg, Blair County, makes yearlong predictions at the beginning of each January.

Acker – who many Tribune-Democrat readers think has a pretty good track record – is calling for fair weather at the end of this month.

Acker, who has had a fascination with weather since he was a child, has been charting his yearlong predictions since the mid-1970s. He bases his predictions on personal observations of the moon and a complicated chart of moon changes in Baer’s Almanac.

The first week of December should be cold and windy with some snow and a heavy snow is predicted for Dec. 8-11. Temperatures will dip at mid-month with fair weather moving in for a few days, he said.

Light snow and cold is in store for Dec. 20-23, Acker said, and there should be some snow for Christmas.

Rounding out the year and Acker’s forecast will be sleet turning to snow and cold temperatures for the last few days of December.